William Hendry (1826 - 1895) The assumption that William Hendry, the partner of Mary Mathieson and father of her first two children, would have been in Ayrshire around 1850- 53 led to the identity investigation based on Census returns from Ayrshire for the rest of the 19th century. This didn’t come up with any definite conclusions but some ‘possibilities’. One may be fairly confident that William Hendry was a Roman Catholic as the two children were baptised in a Roman Catholic church. Mary Mathieson was a subsequently married in a Protestant church. In June 2026 a DNA link was revealed by MyHeritage showing a connection between the author of this site and a person whose family tree was populated by several persons named William Hendry all of whom were Roman Catholic. The William Hendry at the top of this tree diagram and his wife Margaret McClelland were identified from the marriage record of their son William Hendry who was apparently born in Ireland in 1826. From the time the younger William married Agnes Connor, at the age of 36 (or 40 according to marriage details) in1863, until his death in 1895 he lived in the Hamilton area of Lanarkshire which is approximately 25 miles from Galston in Ayrshire. From the baptism records of his children we can tell he was a Roman Catholic and from censuses (1871-1891) a labourer (or stoker) in a gas works. I haven’t so far found him in the 1841 or 1851 Censuses in the Hamilton or Kilmarnock areas, or indeed anywhere. One of the children of William Henry/Hendry and Mary Mathieson, Margaret Henry, stated on her marriage certificate that her father was James Hendry, gasworks labourer, deceased. She gave her mother as Mary Bruce (ms Hendrie). There is much on this certificate that is not quite correct but may be the occupation could be correct?