Tag Archives: family history

Maggie’s Story – In the Shadow of the Pit

Some stories stay with you long after the research is done, and Maggie’s was one of them. As I pieced together the fragments of her life, census entries, marriage records, a death certificate written in a clerk’s careful hand, I found myself deeply moved by the quiet courage threaded through her years. Hers was notContinue reading “Maggie’s Story – In the Shadow of the Pit”

Maggie’s Story

Margaret McDonald Bruce entered the world on 4 November 1874 in the small settlement of Bryans, a scatter of cottages lying in the long shadow of Bryan’s Pit. Though the pit dominated the landscape, her father, William Bruce, himself the son of a miner, had chosen a different path. He worked the fields rather thanContinue reading “Maggie’s Story”