And when you are done looking at this site for the Scots input on football world-wide, here are two more.
For those who literally want to trace on the ground the local development of Scots and Scottish football in our own and other countries there is the newly available and ever-expanding site of:
The Scots Football Historians' Group
And on Scottish sports history in general but inevitably including fitba', see Andy Mitchell's inestimable:
Church Wynd, Bo'ness (1890)
Bo'ness
(and the
Santiago Ramsay Frews)s,
Church Wynd, Bo'Ness (Today)
In 1850 a wee boy was born in Gartsherrie by Coatbridge in Lanarkshire, who, whilst he may not have played football himself or did so only briefly, became an establisher of football in the Chilean capital, Santiago. His name was Alexander Ramsay, the eldest son of an engineer, a mechanic, who was soon by 1855 to take his growing family to Bo'ness on the Firth of Forth there to live out much of the rest of of his life first in Church Wynd, then on Corbiehall and finally on South Street.
And it is Church Wynd that would be the key to this whole story for in nearby Polmont James Frew, a mason, a builder, had married Anne Porteous and in 1848 they produced a daughter, Janet, known inevitably as Jessie. And they too by 1856 had moved to Bo'ness because that was when and where Jessie's mother died and where two years later her father married a widow, Jane Roberts nee Forgie, with by by 1871 his combined family living on North St. but before that also on Church Wynd. It meant that in 1861 the Frews and the Ramsays had been very close neighbours and even a decade later stayed only a couple of minutes apart on foot.
Alexander Ramsay would seem to have started work very early. At ten he seems already to have been working as a Engine Minder, an embryo engine mechanic, then at twenty, as his mother passed away still on Church Wynd, to have been already away to appear by 1876, so aged twenty-six, perhaps with some limited football experience from home, in Chanaral in Chile's northern Atacama Region. It is even today a significant producer of copper. Moreover, Jessie had clearly joined him there, child-hood sweethearts, since their first child, Ana (Anna) Porteous, was born in the mining-town in 1876, followed in 1979 Juan (John). Furthermore, after probably the standard four-year contract, the decision was clearly taken to remain in Chile but to move to Santiago. In 1885 Alexander is recorded there working as a Machinist but in the meantime Jessie had in the burgeoning capital city already given birth to two more sons, Alexander Jnr. in 1982 and James in 1884.
Alexander and Jessie Ramsay and their children with two more boys, Arthur and Joe, born to 1892 would become a major part of Santiago's prominent Scots community with an ear on the Diasporan telegraph, not least football. Alex Snr would become a train driver operating out of the city's Southern Station. Meanwhile, at least three of his lads, John, Alex Jnr and Joe, had, obviously by cultural absorption not direct demonstration, taken to football, as no doubt the boy from Bo'ness watched on until his early death in 1909 and burial in his adopted city's General Cemetery. He would be survive by Jessie for two decades, she laid to rest with him in 1929, and surrounded by other members of the family with one exception. The Santiago grave is each year the location of a ceremony from the local Society for Past-Sportsmen honouring what remain unique contributions on- and off-the-field in implanting football in their adopted country. However, in December 1914 James, named for her father, but of Erasmo Escala 2620, Santiago, Chile, South America would return to the UK, volunteer with the Middlesex Regiment and be killed in April 1917, remembered at the Arras Memorial.
