Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History

Married surnames

The modern English custom of women automatically adopting their husband’s name on marriage spread into Scotland by the nineteenth century, and was used (or imposed) almost universally in the census returns, but in many other records you’ll find the older custom of women keeping their maiden name. Thus, Robbie Burns’ wife was known as Jean Armour, not Jean Burns. Even when women adopted their husband’s surname, they often reverted to their maiden names if widowed.

The Ragman Rolls

The Ragman Rolls were two lists of nobles and other ‘subjects superior’ forced to swear allegiance to King Edward I of England during his interference in the Scottish succession in 1291 and 1296. The list, published by the Bannatyne Club in 1834, is at www.rampantscotland.com/ragman/blragman_index.htm. Its great use is identifying early (or earliest) bearers of surnames that were often taken from the land families were then holding. Queen Victoria’s prime minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98) did much to try to help poor Scots, through the Napier Commission, for example (see pp. 150-1). He was born in Liverpool, but his ancestry lay in Scotland. Hubert de Gledestan appears in the Ragman Roll. From him, a line comes down to the Gladstones of Arthurshiels, who settled in Biggar as maltmen. A branch of these moved to Leith, then Liverpool, producing the prime minister. Another branch ended with the mother of local genealogist Brian Lambie. She was the last Gladstone to be born in Biggar, although many Biggar people are cousins of the great Gladstone. The early Gladstones are buried on the outside wall of the old Libberton Kirk, which was rebuilt in 1810, partly over the old site, with the effect, as Brian says, ‘some Gladstones may now be partly inside with their feet out in the cold!’

Gaelic place names

The name of Ailsa Craig, an island in the Firth of Clyde, contains the Gaelic creag, meaning ‘rock’.

Some places with Gaelic names were given new names by English-speakers – Cill Rìmhinn (‘church of the king’s hill’) is now called St Andrew’s. However, whilst some names survive with their old spellings, many, as with surnames, have half-survived through Anglicization (such as Bowmore for Bogha Mòr, ‘great rock submerged in the sea’) or through direct translation, sometimes of only part of the name. Lochgilphead was Ceann Loch Gilb (where Ceann means ‘head’), for example. Known changes of parish names up to the 1790s are detailed in volume 20 of the First Statistical Account (see p. 32).

This becomes very relevant to genealogists when an ancestor gave a place of origin in a form that is no longer used. If a Gaelic place name is given, and you cannot find it, find out what it means and see if it now exists in an English translation.

Modern Ordnance Survey maps show many places in their Gaelic form, as authentically as possible. The commonest elements of place names are:

Achadh = field, such as Achiltibuie

Bad = place

Baile = township, such as Ballygrant

Caol = strait, such as Kylesku

Ceann – head, such as Kinloch

Cill = church or (monastic) cell, such as Kilbride

Creag = rock, such as Craiglarach

Druim = ridge, such as Drumpellier

Dùn = fort, such as Dunblane

Inbhir = mouth of river, such as Inverary

Na = of the

Rubha = promontory, such as Rhu

Srath = valley, such as Strathnaver

Taigh = house, such as Tighnabruaich

Badnaban meant ‘place of the women’; Cnocaneach ‘hill of the horses’ and Badnahachlais ‘place of the armpit’, presumably because it was in a narrow valley that does look rather like one.

Anglicization

As Scots and English replaced Gaelic, Gaelic surnames were Anglicized, leading to many changes in spelling, that often disguised true meanings. ‘Mac Gille’, meaning ‘son of the servant of…’ often became ‘McIl…’ or ‘Macel…’ There was also a tendency (on the part of registrars) to change difficult-to-spell Gaelic surnames into more familiar, existing surnames that sounded similar, which is how some MacEahcrans became Cochranes, and some O’Brolachans are now Brodies. Some surnames were subject to (almost) literal translations: some MacIntyres (‘son of the carpenter’) are now called Wright, for wrights crafted things.

Nicknames

Where a surname was very common, families might add an extra nickname or ‘tee name’. In her excellent Scottish Family Tree Detective (Manchester University Press, 2006), Rosemary Bigwood notes some north-east coast families being known by their surname followed by the name of their fishing boat, whilst in the Hebrides Bill Lawson noted extra surnames such as Kelper (kelp harvester), Clachair (mason) and Saighdear (soldier, usually used of an army pensioner). The MacLeod descendants of John MacLeod from Muck, who settled in Harris in 1779 as a gardener, are known locally as MacLeod na Gairneileirean, or just na Gairneileirean, ‘the Gardeners’.

Other nicknames were from characteristics, such as Dubh (black-haired) and Ruadh (redhaired). Red-haired Angus MacDougal might thus be known as Angus Ruadh Mac Dougal, or Angus Mac Dougal Ruadh. In the Lowlands, when the patronymic system died out nicknames could become people’s only surnames, such as Duff (from Duhb) or Cruikshanks (‘crooked legs’). Many people also became known by where they lived – Cairncross, Cairns, Cladcleuch and so on, some with interesting twists: the Caithness family aren’t from Caithness, but from Kettins in the barony of Angus.

The writer Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). His surname means literally ‘Scot’ and was borne by a great clan on the English-Scots borders.

Speaking Gaelic

The language of the Picts was a dialect of ancient British, akin to modern Welsh. Gaelic, another branch of the same tongue, developed in Ireland and was spoken by Irish settlers (the Scots) in Argyll and up the west coast, especially after the establishment of the Scots kingdom of Dalriada, about the second century AD. It gradually displaced ‘Pictish’ in the west and north. Its decline in the Lowlands was due mainly to the spread of Scots and English in the royal towns or burghs, and after the battle of Culloden in 1746 it began to vanish from the Highlands too. In the 1830s, the Second Statistical Account reports, for far-flung Assynt, Sutherland, that Gaelic was still spoken universally there, ‘…the only medium of religious instruction. The English language, however, is making slow but sure progress. The youth of the parish are ambitious of acquiring it, being sensible that the want of it proves a great bar to their advancement in life. It is likely, nonetheless, that Assynt is one of the very last districts in which the Gaelic language shall cease to be the language of the people.’

Ironically, the Gaelic School Society helped bring Gaelic to an end: once children had learned to read the scripture in Gaelic, the Account says, they wanted to read more on other subjects, and to do this they needed to learn English.

The Vikings’ tongue survives in many words and place names used in the areas they settled, and as a Scots/Norse hybrid, Norn, the native tongue of the Orkneys and Shetlands.

The Scots language – for language it is – is a descendant, along with Northumbrian English, of the tongue of the Anglians of Lothian. It gradually dominated the Lowlands and then pushed northwards, though borrowing words freely from Gaelic, French, Dutch, and English. It was the official tongue of Scotland until 1707. In 1773, Dr Johnson observed that:

‘…the conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to the English; their peculiarities wear fast away: their dialect is likely to become in half a century provincial and rustick, even to themselves. The great, the learned, the ambitious, and the vain, all cultivate the English phrase, and English pronunciation, and in splendid companies Scotch is not much heard, except now and then from an old lady.’

By writing in Scots, Burns helped save the language from obscurity and helped restore some of its old dignity too. Later writers and poets, such as William Robertson Melvin in the nineteenth century and Hugh MacDairmid in the twentieth century, have contributed to a limited revival. See Scots-English English-Scots Dictionary (Lomond Books, 1998, repr. 2001), The Concise Scots Dictionary (Polygon at Edinburgh, 1999) and an online dictionary, www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl.

CHAPTER 4 Know your parish (#ulink_ebfe0af3-e378-5c32-a502-7469c181353b)

Your chances of success in tracing your Scottish family history, and of deriving enormous enjoyment from doing so, will be greatly enhanced by spending some time finding out about the places where your family lived.

Trying to trace a family tree without studying where people lived makes no sense. Knowing whether the parish was a Highland or Lowland one makes a massive difference in understanding the sort of people who lived there. Were your people from an isolated Highland crofting district, a coastal settlement dependant on kelp and fish, a comfortable Lowland farming community or a prosperous royal burgh? You also need to know about the place to start working out what records it is likely to have generated, and where these will be found. If the area was subject to a franchise court, its records could be searched. Which commissary and sheriff’s courts had jurisdiction there? The more you know, the better.

A farmer at Stroncruby tills his field using a horse-drawn plough, while his bull grazes the pasture and a goat makes do further up the mountain, from Hume’s 1774 Survey of Assynt, Map 11 (courtesy of Lord Strathnaver).

Scotland’s parishes

Church reform was pioneered by St Margaret, wife of Malcolm III Canmore (d. 1093). Up to then, priests lived under the same roofs as their lords or in monastic houses, some of which dated back to the time of St Columba (521-97), the Gaelic missionary credited with introducing Christianity to the Picts. By 1200, however, 11 dioceses had been created across the southern feudalized areas, each run by a bishop and divided into parishes containing new churches. The system was eventually extended across the whole country, with parishes dividing as the population grew. The rather chaotic situation, with no less than 64 parishes straddling county boundaries, was rationalized in 1891, meaning that some ancestors who never moved house appeared in one parish record before 1891, and in another one afterwards.

When General Registration was introduced in 1855 each parish also became a Registration District, numbered from the furthest north (no. 1, Bressay) and working down to the furthest south (no. 901, Wigtown). Large city parishes were divided into several registration districts, and identified by the parish number followed by 1,2,3, etc. in superscript.

Local histories

The histories of many parishes have been written up. Ask at the local archives, look in the NLS catalogue or in The Bibliography of Scotland on

Some historical background

King Malcolm III Canmore and his wife, St Margaret (both died 1093).

Kilchurn Castle, Loch Awe, Co. Argyll, seat of the Campbells of Glenorchy.

The records you will be using have been greatly influenced by Scotland’s history, and in particular by King Malcolm III Canmore (d. 1093) and his immediate descendants, who consolidated royal power in Scotland.