On these pages are documented the family group sheets of three of the five children of David [AN64] and Elizabeth [AN65] Symon that are known to have married and had children: Ann Symon and James Lawrie; Euphemia Symon and John Constable; John Symon and Betsy Pitkeathly. There was 17 years between the eldest known child, Ann (born 1787), and the last known child, David (born 1804). There was nearly 19 years between the marriages of Ann (1810) and David (1829). The children descended from the youngest of the five children, David Symon [AN32], and his wife Elizabeth Kelt [AN33], who married in 1829, are direct ancestors in  my own line and are documented elsewhere on this website.  The fifth child, Margaret Symon, has left no document other than her baptism.

David Symon senior [AN64] was a linen hand loom weaver in Errol in the 1780s, at a time when the toun was expanding as a linen weaving station around the time the landowner "Fish" Crawford, M.P. sold the estate to John Allen, the putting-out trade being managed by a network of agents and stamp masters of the British Linen Company, and employing probably between a third and a half of the adult men living in the very densely populated town. We know  from the visit of Pennant, on his travels through Scotland around the time, that the village of Errol was known for its views and the Carse was already renowned for its fertile and well-ordered landscape of grain fields, tree-lined avenues and wooded gentlemen's seats. Pennant describes a venerable old tree in the policies of Crawford's Errol Park house that had a circumference of over five feet (unfortunately he did not specify the type of tree, described only as an "arbor vitae").

David senior and Elizabeth Symon's two sons, David [AN32] and elder brother John, started adult life as weavers too. The railway that was opened in 1847 allowed distribution of locally produced brick and drainage tiles for the growing urban markets and David went into general labouring work before working as a brick and tile maker and foreman at the works at Inchcoonans where his son, Peter [AN16] also had a supervisory role for many years before becoming a butcher in Errol and then setting up as a land drainage contractor.

John became a sheriff officer (a "mare" in old Scots, or a bailiff in modern terms). With his wife Betsy, who came from the Bridge of Earn area (where there was a Pitkaithly estate), and whom he married in1826, he had several children.

In 1810, the eldest known child, Ann, married an Inchture man, James Lawrie, who may have also been a weaver to start with but who went into running inns for most of his adult life, which in those days meant brewing his own beer. By the 1840s they had moved across the Tay to Fife, where they seem to have run an inn in Cupar before taking over the Commercial Hotel in the East Port of Newburgh. Later in her life, after James died, Ann moved to a house on Newburgh High Street where she worked feeding cows. They had a large family, most of whom married into the Newburgh population and formed their own families.  The eldest child, Elizabeth, may have married John Allan, a shoemaker from Abernethy, a few miles away in Perthshire, and raised a family at an address on Newburgh High Street. Another child, David Lawrie, was a grave digger in Newburgh's cemetery on Cupar Road. Another son, John, seems to have also been an innkeeper like his father. A daughter, Ann, married a tailor and clothier, Alexander Craighead, who was also a Town Councillor in the burgh of Newburgh and was Provost of Newburgh for a time, and had a large family. Either the same Alexander Craighead or their son of the same name would appear to have been the Postmaster for Newburgh later on in the 19th century.

In 1812, Euphemia Symon, or "Effie", as she would probably have been known, married an Inchture man, John Constable, who was a ploughman. They seem to have moved around farms in the Carse of Gowrie but returned to Errol. One their sons trained in medicine at Glasgow University and became the GP in Leuchars, Fife where he practised for many years.