Dates

• Existence: 1744 - 1804

Biography

William Anderson was an ironmonger based in the West Bow, Edinburgh. He was the second son of Robert Anderson and Alison Pringle, born just before the Jacobite rebellion broke out in 1745.

William received a sound mercantile education and later studied Greek and Hebrew. His father apprenticed him to James Grant, an ironmonger, to whom William became successively manager, partner, and successor in the business. James Grant's shop was at the foot of the West Bow on the east side, with the shop on the ground floor and a house above, in which William Anderson and his family lived. By 1773, William had taken over the shop and occupied it till his death in 1804, paying annual rent to Mr Grant's widow.

In 1781, William was made a burgess and guild brother of Edinburgh by right of his father, Robert.

In 1768, William Anderson married Agnes Greig, daughter of Captain James Greig, shipmaster in Inverkeithing. William and Agnes had five sons, of whom Robert, James, William, and Charles lived to manhood. The second youngest boy, John, died at one and a half, which broke his mother's heart, and her own death followed soon after. A few years later he married again; his second wife was Jean Moubray, the second daughter of Alexander Moubray, a merchant in Edinburgh. After Jean had borne him three children, two of whom died in infancy, she suffered a mental decline and eventually had to be removed from her family and put into care for the rest of her life.

Towards the end of the 1700s, William's house over the shop in the West Bow was ran by three of his sons' wives in turn. First Robert married, then William and Charles, and as each son had a family and moved to a home of his own, the next daughter-in-law took over the task. William Anderson spent the last year of his life in 37 Candlemaker Row, with his youngest son Christopher, and his son William's widow and her little girl, and he died in that house at the age of sixty. William' estate was divided equally between his four surviving sons, Robert, James, Charles, and Christopher.

For over forty years he had been a member and deacon of the church in Candlemaker Row. His handwritten sermons of the year 1792 were bound into a book, and, one hundred and seventeen years later, one of these sermons was read before a Baptist congregation in Edinburgh by the husband of William Anderson's great-granddaughter.

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