1864 to 1895
Gatehouse was a planned town that was created in the early part of the industrial revolution. `The community was rural, based on agriculture. The factories that were created brought in labour from elsewhere. The isolation of Gatehouse and competition from the more powerful steam power meant that water-powered factories could not compete and hence businesses closed. Many lost jobs and financial hardship resulted, with the churches organissing parish help schemes.
There was a Poor House in Kirkcudbright which provided accommodation, but there was also an Inspector of the Poor whose remit was to provide financial aid to those most in need. This continued until at least after WW1, when R A Mitchell occupied the position. His descendants "inherited" the Poor Law Book, and in 1999 a small number of copies were assembled into bound volumes. Our web-pages now contain indexed copies of these pages. We believe the bound volumes were donated to various institutions by Robert Mitchell, grandson of R A Mitchell.
The 5 sub-pages required a substantial amount of manual typing of details and of links to pages in the Poor Law Book. If you find a typing mistake or if the page link goes to the wrong page please contact us at Graham & Margaret.
Names are listed in alphabetical order of surnames and then first names. Married women are primarily listed by their maiden surname. Many of the earlier entries never recorded the maiden names of married women so the Poor Law Book records them under surname 'Unknown'. In these cases the relevant webpage provides the married surname in squared brackets ([...]). These are not sorted into alphabetical order.
If you find the name of a person that you are interested in then click on the Page for that person - the relevant page of the Poor Law Book should then be displayed in .pdf format.
Poor Law pages run from 1 to 342, but 317, 318, 323 & 324 are missing. There do not appear to be references to these pages so maybe they were empty anyway.
At some stage we would like to re-sort the index to be based on married surnames instead of maiden names.