Sivell Family

I have done a little work to trace my family, creating a family tree online, but I don’t have the required persistence for genealogy. I joined Ancestry.com with a World membership to document my family tree back a few generations.  The tree is public, and can be viewed online with a guest membership. I have uploaded some photos and records, and attached others from other trees. I enjoyed connecting some of the dots, especially tracing stories for family members I had met or knew about.  But the information becomes increasingly unreliable going back a few generations, especially in Scotland where the records are terse or missing altogether.  I have not been rigorous verifying all connections.  After a few months I let my membership lapse, and set aside family research! Here is a bit about more recent generations.

Sivell is my mother’s family name.  Elspeth Sivell was born in Paisley, Scotland, and was an only child. Her parents built a home in Kirkcudbright, where she spent most of her childhood.  She graduated from Aberdeen University, where she met my father. My maternal grandfather Robert Sivell died when I was only three years old.

Robert Sivell, R.S.A., was a painter whose art work I respect and enjoy. His work includes commissioned portraits, commissions from the British War Musueum during WW II, and an immense set of murals on the walls of the Student Union of Aberdeen University. Various members of the family, especially my mother and grandmother, show up often in Robert Sivell’s paintings. I try to track these paintings and collect images for my family records. My Mother loved her artist father, and kept many photos, paintings, and memorabilia.

My grandfather, always known always to us as Bob, had a brother and three sisters, two of whom emigrated to Canada. Their grandfather was Henry James Sivell, of Port Glasgow Scotland, the captain of a sailing ship named the “William Campbell” which sank in 1858. My great grandfather was also named Robert Sivell, he married Agnes Wylie in 1876. Members of the Sivell family dispersed to Australia, Canada, and the United States.

The Sivell family has been thought to have moved to Paisley, Scotland as part of a migration of Flemish weavers in the mid-nineteenth century. My maternal grandfather, Robert Sivell, liked to think he had Italian roots, but he had no known basis for this idea other than his olive skin and general appearance. His father may have been a Paisley carpenter or ship builder, and before that there was Henry Sivell, a sailing ship captain, drowned in the Clyde when his ship collided with a steam ship.

I have some written history focused on my grandfather, memories from my Mother consisting of a combination of direct recollections, second hand stories, and gleanings from old articles, letters and notes. She saved many articles, certificates, and receipts dealing with his exhibits and specific paintings.

Stowell Family

My father’s name was Hilton Stowell, and he was born and raised in London, England, son of Oscar Stowell and May Lillian Dora Fisk Stowell.  I am not sure what took him to Aberdeen, where he met my mother. He had one much older sister, my aunt Marjorie, who lived and worked in London, and never married. After my parents moved to the United States in 1964 we stayed in touch, and I saw her again, once in the U.S. and once on a visit to England. My father returned to England to live with her for a year or so not too long before she died. 

My grandfather, Oscar Stowell, died in 1947, before I was born, and I don’t remember meeting any of his siblings or other members of the Stowell family. Stowell is a common family name in the UK, and I don’t have much evidence of the connections, although my father was fairly convinced that we are directly descended from the (very religious!) Stowells from the Isle of Mann. If so there are a number of reverends and religious schoolmasters in the family line.