Barbara Plenderleith

When Barbara Plenderleith, my three times great grandmother, was born on 2 November 1797 in South Leith, Midlothian, her father, John, was 42, and her mother, Elizabeth, was 25. She married Daniel Pender on 8 November 1821 in St. Cuthbert’s, Midlothian. They had nine children in 16 years. She died on 23 March 1867 in Edinburgh, Midlothian, at the age of 69, and was buried there.

Barbara Plenderleith’s family moved from Dalkeith in Midlothian to South Leith. At the start of the 19th century, Leith was booming as Edinburgh’s port and industrial suburb. Many families came from outlying agricultural areas for housing and steadier, year-round wages, which contrasted with seasonal or insecure rural work. As trade and dock activity increased in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, existing buildings were divided into small dwellings and “single‑ends”, causing severe overcrowding and poor housing with inadequate sanitation. Despite this, official reports on Scottish working‑class districts, including Leith parishes, describe the inhabitants as generally in as good or better health than expected. There was no widespread starvation, though destitution and insecurity were present.

Barbera Plenderleith married Daniel Pender on 8th Nov 1867 in Edinburgh’s St. Cuthbert’s Parish. Between 1824 and 1840, they had nine children: Euphemia (1824), Daniel (1826), Alexander (1826), John (1828), Christina (1831), Georgina (1835), William (1836), Jane (1836), and George (1840).

For most of their married life, they lived in the Stockbridge area, south of Edinburgh’s Old Town. By 1850, the area had undergone a major transformation driven by the portrait painter Sir Henry Raeburn, who owned the Deanhaugh and St Bernard’s estates. Deanhaugh Street was home to artisans and the labouring poor. While some parts of Stockbridge were becoming respectable, the tenements often housed large families in cramped quarters. Coal fires were the only source of heat, and the air was thick with haar mixed with coal smoke.