Occasionally, in the course of tracing family history, a specific place or event can take hold in the imagination. In my case, this happened with an ancient tenement in Edinburgh's Canongate, which carries the fanciful name of Morocco Close. That is where my great grandmother Agnes Reid was born and spent the first years of her childhood. It is also where her father died in 1839. My purpose, in these pages, is to draw the threads that lead to and from Morocco Close, breathe some life into its late Georgian and early Victorian inhabitants, and bring some order into a very tangled web.

Andrew Griffiths: Andrew Griffiths lives near Darmstadt in Germany. He has been researching his Scottish ancestors for many years.