Amy Young (1890 - 1974) published privately "Blaikie of Aberdeen" at Pietermaritzburg in 1971.  The book is a splendid compilation of genealogical knowledge drawn from many sources: in her text Amy charmingly combines a range of anecdotes, well judged to bring our kinsfolk (almost) to life, with the slightly dryer information concerning who begat whom and when and where etc.   Amy died shortly after this book was published and it is a matter for personal regret that the present compiler never met her.  But I am grateful to her surviving siblings, for agreeing to the reproduction online of the following extract.   I see the chance to make the text accessible to a wider  audience of relatives and potential relatives as a way to celebrate, and to pay tribute to, the work Amy Young devoted to researching many historical aspects of the Blaikie family.  Though it is worth stressing that this is only a portion of a larger body of genealogical research that Amy undertook and recorded.

Anthony [Anthony Adrian Blaikie 1827 - 1871] and Helen Blaikie's [Helen Blaikie 1831 - 1887*]eldest son, James Adrian  [James Adrian Blaikie 1859 - 1879] was born in Aberdeen in 1859 and was brought with them to Natal in 1861.  He went to the High School (afterwards Maritzburg College) in June 1869 and left at the end of  1872 for Fettes College, Edinburgh.  Returning to Natal, he entered a  solicitor's office and it was then that he joined the Natal Carbineers.
 The Volunteers were called up in the Zulu War and Jim Blaikie lost his life at Islandhlwana in January, 1879.   He was nineteen years old.   This short biography comes from A Story of an African City by J. Forsyth  Ingram, chapter sixteen and we know too that while in Scotland Jim was  looked after by his uncle and aunt, the William Garden Blaikies  [William Garden Blaikie 1820 - 1899].   Before going to  the Zulu War, Jim had bought himself a narrow silver band which he wore on his wrist.   Whether it was the fashion or his own idea I am not sure.  His younger brother, Harry [Henry Blaikie 1869 - 1931], had one too. After their victory at  Islandhlwana the Zulus disembowelled the dead and left them where they had  fallen and in most cases they took nothing from their persons.   It was  the sad task of relatives, after the war, to find their dead and bury  them.   Kenneth Hathorn  [Kenneth Howard Hathorn 1849 - 1933] who had married Agnes Blaikie [Agnes Elizabeth Blaikiey Blaikie 1853 - 1894] [and thereby in 1890  produced, as their fifth child, the writer from whom I am quoting, Amy  Hathorn / Young] went to bury Jim.   The Natal Carbineers had fallen next  to each other round their leader Colonel A W Durnford.   KH identified  Jim's body by the silver bracelet and by the size of his head. He had a  big head and so had KH who tried his own hat on the poor dead head and  found it a firm fit.   Kenneth Hathorn went twice to the battle field and  I surmise that he went the second time to place the stone on Jim's grave. It had been imported from Aberdeen and is granite of a red brown colour  and it lies flat on the ground the length of the grave.  The inscription reads:

"In memory of James Adrian Blaikie, eldest son of the late Anthony Adrian  Blaikie, formerly of Aberdeen, a Volunteer Trooper in the Natal Carbineers. Killed here in battle, 22nd January 1879, aged 19 years."

Among our old papers is a newspaper cutting, undated save for 1881 and  taken possibly from the Natal Witness.  It is part of a serial story about  the Zulu War called Saints and Sinners, a South African story in two  parts.  In Part II, Chapter eleven, one of the characters is old Mrs West,  who drives about the town cheering everybody with kindly words.  Her young  married daughter is seated beside her in their trim little pony carriage.  Mrs West is an object of cheerfulness and courage, her silver hair shining  beneath her widow's cap.  She refuses to believe than her boy Jemmy is  killed.   "He will come home to plague his mother yet", she exclaims with  flashing blue eyes.   The next day high hope fades to uncertainty and then  despair. Jemmy West was last seen with his back against a rock facing a  score of Zulu assegais.   Mrs West is Mrs Anthony Blaikie, the young  married daughter, Agnes, and the pony carriage, hers and Kenneth's Jemmy is Jim Blaikie

Amy goes on to mention Jim Blaikie's inclusion on the Zulu War Memorial

* Helen Blaikie 1831 - 1887 married her first cousin: they were both born with the Blaikie family name