Author: Sands, John Sim
Biography:
SANDS, John Sim (1798-1866: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 29 May 1798 and baptised in the Dissenting Congregation at Perth, Scotland, the son of Robert Sands, a weaver, and his wife Ann Glass, who had married in 1787. Nothing is known of his education but by 1823 he was practising as a writer (solicitor) in Coupar Angus where he also seems to have met his future wife, Christian Anderson. They married on 7 Oct. 1823 at Arbroath and went on to have at least twelve children. By the time he published Poems on Various Subjects (1833) he had already established a reputation for caustic and often quarrelsome commentary on people and events. This intensified when he became the editor and part proprietor of first the Argus (Arbroath) and then from 1837 the Arbroath Journal. His later publishing ventures failed and with few friends, his last years were marked by an itinerant existence leading him eventually to the Perth Workhouse, where he died a pauper on 31 Aug. 1866. His wife survived him but it is not known how she and the large number of children (almost all whom survived into adulthood) lived after his death. (Scotland's People; ancestry.co.uk 28 Jul. 2021; Perth Advertiser 14 Feb. 1833; Arbroath Herald 9 July 1896) AA