Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History

As T.C. Smout writes in his immensely useful A History of the Scottish People 1560-1830 (Fontana Press, 1969, repr. 1985), modern Scotland comprises 80 per cent rough moor and bog, and things have improved vastly since Malcolm’s day. Then, its roughly 250,000 people inhabited tiny islands of semi-cultivated land, linked by boggy footpaths, surrounded by a howling wilderness of wolves, beavers, wild boar and aurochs. Their stone-walled homes, roofed with brushwood, turf or skins, were clustered into tiny farmtouns or bailies. Though ostensibly farmers, most people still depended heavily on Stone Age skills of hunting wild animals and gathering shellfish and fruits. Their overlords, the mormaers or earls, were of Pictish origin, and their groupings and allegiances mainly tribal.

Malcolm and his wife St Margaret were influenced by the Normans’ adaptation of Roman ideas on how to run countries, and introduced similar systems of government in Scotland. Their son David I (d. 1153) spent 40 years at the English court, where he was Earl of Huntingdon. When he inherited the throne David came north with a great retinue of Anglo-Norman followers. ‘French in race and manner of life, in speech and culture’, the Scottish kings started to transform Scotland into a modern state, using feudalism, creation of royal burghs and sheriffdoms, and church reform as their chief tools.

To feudalize a country, the king assumed full ownership of all land, and then granted parts of it to lords in return for their military support. David I started this process, leaving the old mormaers in place, but as new feudal lords. Through intermarriage, the old and new aristocracies merged into a semi-Norman, semi-native ruling class.

The Canmore kings peppered the Lowlands with royal castles, and round each created royal burghs, which were settlements of craftsmen and merchants with trade monopolies over the hinterland. The burgers were drawn mainly from immigrant Normans, Angles, Scandinavians and Flemings, and used English as their lingua franca, contributing to the retreat of Gaelic into the Highlands. David I planted his burghs as far south-west as Ayr and Renfrew, and as far north-east as Dingwall and Inverness, but though they later spread all over the Lowlands, they never penetrated the fastnesses of the Highlands.

The ‘colonized’ lands were divided into counties, each with a sheriff controlling one of the castles. Sheriffs were either mormaers or Norman lords: the sheriffdoms rapidly became hereditary, but always subject to the King’s good graces. The system was gradually extended into the Highlands until the whole of Scotland had been ‘shired’. The counties remained unchanged until 1974, when they were replaced with large regions (such as Grampian and Strathclyde). These were replaced in 1996 with 32 council areas, broadly based on the old shires.

From 1286 onwards the Crown began to weaken. Barony and regality courts sprouted up, ostensibly with royal authority, but effectively tools of the excessive local power of the clan chiefs, sheriffs and feudal lords (often, of course, one and the same).

John Knox administering the first Protestant sacrament in Scotland. Although the parish system pre-dated his Church of Scotland, it was absorbed into the new reformed church.

Official guides

The GROS’s Civil Parish Map Index shows the 871 current civil parishes (descendants of the old ecclesiastical parishes). An online version is at www.scrol.gov.uk/scrol/metadata/maps/Scotland%20-%20Civil%20Parishes.pdf.The Registration districts of Scotland from 1855, for sale at the ScotlandsPeople Centre, catalogues the changes that have been made to registration districts since 1855.

www.sbo.nls.uk/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon. cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First. Besides providing background, histories may identify unusual local sources, or actually name your ancestors.

Statistical Accounts

Read about your parish in the Old and New Statistical Accounts, on www.edina.ac.uk/stat-acc-scot/.

The Old or First Statistical Account (1791-9) was the work of ‘Agricultural’ Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster (1754-1835), MP for Caithness. In 1790, desiring ‘to elucidate the Natural History and Political State of Scotland’, he sent a detailed questionnaire to each parish minister, asking about geography, climate, natural resources and social customs. He received all manner of different answers, including a lot of idiosyncratic notes, and published the lot.

The New or Second Statistical Account was commissioned by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1832. It included maps of the counties and took evidence from schoolmasters and doctors as well as ministers. It was published in volumes between 1834 and 1845. For Assynt, Sutherland, for example, we learn ‘There is no register of date previous to 1798. Since that period, births and marriages have been recorded with tolerable regularity, but there is no register of deaths’, and the population was 1800 in 1760, 2419 in 1801, and 3161 in 1831, divided into 375 families, and 1400 of the population was attached to the church and parish of ‘Store’ (Stoer).

A Third Statistical Account was created between 1951 and 1992 and can be inspected in libraries. A Fourth Statistical Account of East Lothian is on its way.

Volume 20 of the Old Statistical Account has a ‘List of Parishes suppressed, annexed to other parishes, or which have changed their names, with a corresponding List of the Parishes under which they are now included’.

Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster (1754-1835), who initiated the First Statistical Account of Scotland.

Groome and Lewis

Francis H. Groome’s Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland was compiled between 1882 and 1885. It is always worth checking since it states which presbytery and synod assemblies covered each parish, and will help you sort out places with the same name. It is online at www.visionofbritain.org and at the Gazetteer for Scotland, www.geo.ed.ac.uk/scotgaz/gaztitle.html.

Samuel Lewis’s A Topographical Dictionary of Scotland (1846) is online at www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=308.

Obscure place names

These can present a problem if their location is not clear from the records. If even a ‘Google’ search yields nothing, try the place name indexes in the Register of the Great Seal of Scotland (1306-1659); the sasine abridgements, or documents of land grants, (1781-1830), or enquire at Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies, which has records down to the level of individual field names. The GROS Index of Scottish Place Names is helpful, as is L.R. Timperley’s A Directory of Landownership in Scotland c.1770 (SRS, 1976).

Useful websites

www.genuki.org.uk (Genuki) is a free website for United Kingdom genealogy. Its Scottish section (www.genuki.org.uk/big/sct/) can be searched by topic or by county. It presents a map of the pre-1890s counties and, by clicking on the county name, you will be given a brief description, a list of parishes, links to the county’s Family History Society, archives and libraries, notes on special resources, and links to relevant sections of GenWeb, a worldwide network of genealogists.

www.ambaile.org.uk. The Highland Council Archive Service’s resources website (for the Highlands) containing old pictures, postcards, newspaper articles, personal family photographs and items of oral history.

www.scotlandgenweb.org is the homepage of the Scotland GenWeb project. This volunteer-run service provides county-by-county pages of links to sites concerning families, places and topics, and is well worth exploring.

Maps

These are splendid ways of looking down on your ancestors’ world, to see what the terrain was like, what roads, rivers and railways there were, what other parishes were nearby – and perhaps even spot their actual houses.

All local archives and histories will help here. Reference books often say you will sometimes find detailed local maps in estate records, records of railway and canal companies, and processes of the Court of Session (as detailed in Descriptive List of Plans in the Scottish Record Office) – but few people have time to search these, and many already appear in local history books. But do look at the National Library of Scotland’s map collection, in Edinburgh, or at its fabulous site, www.nls.uk/maps/index.html. This includes the earliest surviving detailed maps of Scotland, by Timothy Pont, made about 1583-96, which come with textual descriptions

A map from the surveyor’s report to the Crown Commissioners on the lands of Strowan (Struan, Perthshire), one of the estates annexed or forfeited to the Crown after the 1745 rebellion.

Other sites

www.maps.google.co.uk/maps for modern maps.

www.landmap.ac.uk/gallery/imagepages/pages/landmap_dem_250m_scotland_jpg.htm. A relief map of Scotland.

www.rcahms.gov.uk. The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland’s site (incorporating the National Monuments Record of Scotland), with maps and other details of ancient monuments and old buildings.

of places (see www.nls.uk/pont/generalnew.html). Of the island of Raasay, for example, Pont wrote:

‘Raasa ane Ile neer the Skye upon 4 myle long perteyning to Mac-Gillichallum Rasa of the hous of Lewis of old, now holds this Ile of the Earle Seafort, it hath ane paroch kirk Kilmaluag, one castell called Breokill. hard by is Rona, a smal Ile, pertyning to that gentleman also.’

You can study the subject of old maps in A Guide to the Early Maps of Scotland to 1850 (Scottish Royal Geographical Society, 1973).

The Pont maps were saved from almost certain oblivion by Sir James Balfour of Denmilne, Fife (c.1590s-1657), Lord Lyon King of Arms, whose third wife Margaret Arnot of Ferny was a distant cousin of mine. He assembled an important collection of old manuscripts on Scottish history, which is now in the NLS.

The Pont map showing Lochs Awe and Fyne, Co. Argyll.

The Ordnance Survey

One of the finest graphic sources for your family history, often showing your family’s actual homes, are Ordnance Survey maps. Many, both current and historical (dating back over the last two hundred years), are found at local archives.

The Survey was sparked by Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rebellion, known as the ‘45, when King George II’s generals realized they had no serviceable maps of the realm (those that existed stopped at county boundaries, so were useless for military purposes). Between 1747 and 1755 William Roy of the Royal Engineers organized a survey of Scotland, and in 1791 the creation of accurate topographical maps of all Britain began. The Trigonometrical Survey, renamed the Ordnance Survey, created maps to different scales; the most detailed (such as the 1:25,000 Explorer series) will show the shapes of fields and general shape of buildings in the countryside, and the town plans go to sufficient scale to see door steps and bay windows.

It’s hard to date the maps to specific years. A map ‘of 1880’ may have been surveyed a decade before. Some maps showing railways are actually much older maps with new railway lines engraved over the top. This is not a problem if you are aware of the issues and take time to find out the history of the particular map you are studying. For help contact The Ordnance Survey’s Library (Room C454, Ordnance Survey, Romsey Road, Southampton, SO16 4GU, 0845 605 0505, www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk). See also www.Old-Maps.co.uk, where you can search and zoom in on Britain’s Ordnance Survey County Series, 1:10,560 scale, First Edition maps (surveyed from 1846-99).

Finding Cnocaneach

I first encountered the name Cnocaneach, Sutherland, in Malcolm Bangor-Jones’s The Assynt Clearances (The Assynt Press, 2001), which brings together information from sheriff or local court papers and the Sutherland estate papers. We had just bought the booklet in Achins’ book-cum-coffee shop at Inverkirkaig, and were scrutinizing it for more information about the MacLeods in Badnaban. This is what leapt out: ‘Cnocaneach and Badnaban were held [from the Sutherland Estate] by George Ross from Easter Ross who went to work for the Custom House in Ullapool. He had removed people from Cnocaneach prior to 1812. The MacLeods, who were removed when the lands became part of Culag sheepfarm in 1812, accepted holdings in Baddidarrach but then changed their minds.

There were several MacLeod families in Badnaban, and Angus’s was only one, but it was tremendously exciting to have confirmation of exactly where any of them came from, and to discover they had come to Badnaban due to the notorious Highland Clearances (see pp. 147-50).

But where was Cnocaneach? Five minutes scrutinizing the Ordnance Survey’s Explorer Series map of the area revealed ‘Cnoc Innis nan Each’ just next to Badnaban – but that was a red herring: the correct ‘Cnocaneach’ (the hill of the horse’) was a mile and a half away to the east (about 2 kilometers).

An hour later found us panting up the track towards the hollow outlines of buildings indicated by the map. At last, we saw amidst the bracken a ruined dwelling! And then, just round a bend in the track, a derelict house, rebuilt in 1870, but on the ruins of an older one. Round about, various walls indicated where yards and paddocks had been. The MacLeods and the Rosses had been thrown out of Cnocaneach in 1812, and here were their two ruined homes.

It would have been a tough place to live, but not nearly so much as Badnaban on the coast. The MacLeods probably went down to Badnaban in subdued silence, and as we walked back down to the loch, we felt an immense sadness, knowing that the MacLeods had trudged the same path in 1812, carrying all their worldly possessions, leaving their precious crops to be eaten by the landlord’s sheep, and with a very uncertain future ahead of them.

This map, showing both Badnaban and Cnocaneach, was found through a search under ‘Assynt’ at www.nls.uk/maps. The maps are accompanied by Hume’s comments on the farms. Cnocaneach was described as ‘most beautifully situated upon the East side of the Hill of that name, the North and West Sides of which Hills are cover’d with fine full grown Trees, consisting of Oak, Ash, Birch, &c’. Of Badnaban, on the other hand, Hume wrote ‘this small Farm on the South side of Loch Inver at the March with Cullack, is only a subsett, belonging to InverChirkag: it is situate near a Creak of the sea, where Boats land safely, and is occupied by two or three people who complain much of the small priviledge allowed them by their Landlord of the Hill pasture’. The land by the farmhouses was ‘pretty much broke & interjected with Rocks and Stony Baulks’. It was to Badnaban, in full knowledge of Hume’s comments, that people from Cnocaneach were cleared in 1812. From John Hume’s Survey of Assynt, 1774 (courtesy of Lord Strathnaver).