Miners!

Made a really interesting discovery today. My mom is visiting from Maryland and we took a trip to the Scottish National Mining Museum. I'd been there before and really enjoyed it, but I didn't get to see the whole exhibit. This time I brought along Veronica's photo of the miners to see if anybody might be able to tell us approximately when it was taken. Before we got a chance to ask anybody, we made a really exciting discovery in one of the displays I'd missed before:  the very same photo was part of their exhibit!!

It's flipped around, as if the negative was in backwards, but's it's very clearly the same group. And it was on the display telling about immigrant miners from Lithuania. Now I'm quite excited that there may be further information. The photo is credited to the North Lanarkshire Council Museum. Presumably one of the other men had a copy, which eventually made it into the collection. I plan to contact them and see what else is in the collection, or where they got it. I showed one of the tour guides my copy, a former miner himself, and he was quite interested as well. He gave me the name of the museum curator and suggested that I arrange a meeting to see what information I may be able to get.

The guide was also able to tell me which mines were the most likely for Kazimiras to have worked in. There were three within walking distance of the Gorbals:  Cardowan, Garscube, and Nitshill. Of those, Cardowan can be ruled out because it was only in operation (1930-1983) after Kazimiras was gone. Garscube was in operation 1850-1966, so that's a possibility. And I'm not sure about Nitshill (there was apparently a major disaster there in 1851, I think, well before Kazimiras arrived).

My original question, about the date of the photo, is somewhat inconclusive, but they were able to tell me that it was almost certainly before Kazimiras left in 1918(ish). The tallow lamps on their hats were not in use much (or at all) beyond then. They guessed that they were from about 1890 (probably before Kazimiras was "doon the pits"), but we decided that it was possible that immigrant miners - likely poorer and further down the ladder - might have still used them. There was one in the collection, which was labeled as being from the 1800s.

Tallow Lamp

I also picked up a book, Tracing Your Coalmining Ancestors by Brian Elliott. Now I'll just have to find time to read it!