Russians named "George Smith" in Ayrshire

[ksyoung]

I ran across an interesting group of census entries yesterday. I was using Ancestry.com to look for "George Smith" in Ayrshire in the 1901 census. My attention was grabbed by 4 entries in a row of George Smith, birthplace "Russian Sub", living in Kilbirnie. I just had to look at these. They are indeed 4 different men; different ages and living as boarders in different households. They are all "Lab at Steelworks". I realized that "Russian Sub" must mean Russian Subject, and not that they jumped ship from a Russian submarine, when I looked up Russian submarine history on Wikipidia and saw that the first Russia submarine was built in 1902 (and promptly sank in 1904). I can picture these men proudly rattling off their whole Russian name and getting a blank stare and a firm "George Smith".

[Miss Poohs]

Genealogy is always better with a bit of imagination, isn't it?

Poor souls, you can just about imagine their sad deflated wee faces.

[DavidWW]

Russians they are not , except in terms of the country that ruled their part of Poland at the time. (From memory, the rest was split between Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire.)

All the entries are "Poland (Russian Sub[ject])"

And I suspect that it wasn't the enumerator, but the people themelves. On the "George SMITH" page that I looked at there's, .....

Andrew CLERK
John GREEN
Elizabeth GREEN
Simon PETER
George SMITH
Frank MURPHY
William PETER
Anthony SMITH
Annie SMITH
Anthony SMITH - son, born Glengarnock
Peter MILLER
John ADDIE
John GEORGE
John BALLARD

There has to be a story here, but will it be recorded anywhere, or will anyone remember why so many Poles came to work at Glengarnock steel works?

If and when I have time, I'll have a look at other pages in this ED.

David

[DavidWW]

And they possibly weren't Poles either, but Lithuanians

See http://www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/immig_emi ... le_2.shtml

David

[ksyoung]

Thank you, David, for the insights on this; the bbc link was great. I had wondered if the "Russians" had been recruited from their homeland to work in the mines or steelworks. The comments about the resentment toward the Lithuanians over their language and religion sounded just like the reception that "foreign" workers have always gotten here in the US. Some of my Scottish and English ancestors worked in the coal mines of Ilinois here is the US. In reading about the history of coal mining in Illinois, I learned about the prejudice toward Italian immigrant miners because of language and Catholicism. My father can recall seeing this prejudice when he was a little boy, and my grandmother instructed him to never order fish on a Friday, lest someone think he was Catholic. She referred to French and Italians as "those garlic eaters".

The Lithuanians were indeed not happy to be reminded that they were subjects of the Czar. Lithania united with Poland in the 1500s as the "Kingdom of Poland and Lithania", but it seems that everyone except the Lithanians referred to this kingdom as "Poland". Around 1800, Russian defeated and absorbed Poland and Lithania.

[momat]

And I suspect that it wasn't the enumerator, but the people themelves.

My Family lore has it that when my Rus Subj GrandFather arrived in U K with no English ,he was asked his name and in trying to express himself he pointed to his Boots which we presume were Brown.
Hence the very ordinary name.
So maybe some of those adopted names are not so far from the truth.