Alexander Simpson Milne's ancestors mostly lived in Aberdeenshire and Banffshire in the north-east of Scotland. His grandparents and great-grandparents were farmers and agricultural workers (the men), while typical women's occupations were laundress, dressmaker and domestic servant. Alexander spent his career in Asia in the oil industry.
The earliest Milne ancestor I have discovered is Alexander's great-grandfather George Milne (b abt 1783) a farmer who married Helen Shand in 1810. They had seven children between 1811 and 1827.
Their fourth child was Alexander Milne (snr) born in 1817, who between 1850 and 1877 worked as a gamekeeper at Rothiemay in Banffshire. Alexander's first two children, according to the meticulous Scottish records, were:
Alexander (snr) married Isabella Anderson in 1851. There were six further children. He died in 1877.
James Milne is recorded in the 1851, 1861 and 1871 censuses living with his mother and/or grandmother. By 1874, when he married Margaret Watt, he was an ironmonger in Glasgow. Their eighth child, Alexander Simpson Milne, was born in MacDuff, Banffshire, in 1889.
James died in MacDuff in 1891. His illegitimacy is recorded on his death certificate.
Alexander Milne's maternal grandfather, Alexander Watt, was born in 1810 at Innerwick in East Lothian, which is near Dunbar on the Firth of Forth. His parents were James Watt, a farmer, and Janet Brown. Alexander Watt worked as a a farmer, carter and 'hind'. His marriage in 1854 to Isabella Paterson followed the birth, but preceded the baptism, of their eldest son, also an Alexander.
I cannot find a birth or baptism record for Margaret Watt, who was Alexander Milne's mother. The certifcate of her marriage to James Milne in 1874 records her parents as Alexander Watt and Isabella Paterson. Her date of birth is given, in census records from 1861, as about 1850. That is well before her parents were married.
Alexander Watt appears to have died before the 1861 census which records Isabella as head of a household, living with her daughter Margaret. Isabella remarried in 1871, to Alexander Simpson, a widower; was widowed again and moved in with her (widowed) daughter Margaret. Presumably it was her second husband's name that passed on to her grandson Alexander Simpson Milne.
Alexander Simpson Milne was born in MacDuff in 1889, and by the time
of the 1901 census was living with his mother, grandmother, and
six
brothers and sisters in Cathcart, a residential suburb in the south of
Glasgow.
Alexander attended Glasgow University and obtained a B Sc in
engineering in 1911. His first position as an engineer appears to
have been in Japan in 1912, to which he travelled overland by the Trans
Siberian Railway. He was later posted to India where he met and
married Kate Agnes Hewson in 1918. Their eldest child (Peggy) was
born in Calcutta in 1919; their second (my mother Kitty) in
Surabaya, Java (near the largest Indonesian oilfield), in
1920. They later returned to India, where Alexander retired
in 1943, and subsequently moved to England.
For most (or all) of Alexander's professional career he appears to have been employed by companies that emerged following the break-up in 1911 of Standard Oil, one of the world's first and largest multinational corporations of which John D. Rockefeller was founder, chairman and major shareholder. Two of these companies, Jersey Standard and Socony-Vacuum, had interests in Asia which included oil fields in Indonesia and oil refineries in India; and in 1933 merged these interests into a joint venture: Standard-Vacuum Oil Co., or "Stanvac". Alexander became an employee. The joint venture was dissolved in 1962, by which time its interests in India and Indonesia had been nationalised. Jersey Standard was renamed Esso and then Exxon, and Socony-Vacuum renamed Mobil. These two descendents of Standard Oil merged in 1998.
The links below set out relevant phtographs; a tree of Alexander Milne's direct ancestors, as I have been able to establish them back in time; family trees of his great-grandparents George Milne and James Watt as I have been able to follow them forwards; and a summary of their census records from 1841 to 1901.
Alexander's Direct Ancestors A Milne Family Tree A Watt Family Tree
Text revised February 2009, images October 2007