Every good story has an origin myth, a meta-story that leads up to the major plot and fills in important details about the main characters and their circumstances. Since a backstory helps develop a fully realized fictional story world, surely it must be so for factual tales. So…

Charles “Big Honey” Robb Cromar Sr. and Helen “Hennie” Murray Hawkins Cromar | Family photo archive

Family tales

When I was a youngster, my grandmother Helen Murray Hawkins (1907-91) would tell me what I thought were outlandish stories about the Scottish roots of my grandfather, Charles Robb Cromar (1907-82). My mother had nicknamed him “Big Honey,” and he would chime in about this ancestry from time to time, but “Hennie,” as the grandchildren christened Helen, was positively obsessive about it.

The Lost Cause

She was a lady of the Old South, for better and for worse. We know the type: a Daughters of the Confederacy matron right out of central casting. She lived in the faded glory of auld lang syne, tinged with the cognitively dissonant mixture of rueful nostalgia and naked racism that characterizes the cultural conversation over the Lost Cause even today. Her grandfather (my 2nd great-grandfather) Mandeville Hawkins (1816-80) was, indeed, a Confederate veteran. She is, no doubt, rolling over in her grave at the removal of Confederate monuments that adorned Monument Avenue in her home town of Richmond.

Between stories of the “heroics” of her ancestors who—let’s face it—lost a cause that was so worthy of losing, she’d pepper tales of the religious persecution of our Scottish forbearers, and glory in ancestral ties back to Robert the Bruce and the Kings of Scotland. As a brash, know-it-all kid, I thought this was all just a kind of pathetic masquerade for an old woman whose family had enjoyed some measure of wealth and Southern aristocracy. Hennie and Big Honey had married in 1928 and the future looked bright—until the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.

Reflected glory

They ended up struggling as a young couple, and mourning for a personal nobility lost to the ravages of circumstance was the lens through which Hennie viewed the world. Being a now more temperate adult, I don’t judge some of her indulgences as harshly as I once did. Though I will not abide her worship of our treasonous forefathers, living in the reflected magnificence of my grandfather’s Scottish regal descent provided a comfort I would not deny her.

Of course, the oral history backing up these tales of glory rested soundly on no proof whatsoever. It was hearsay passed down to her from my great-grandmother Christiana Berry Robb. Grandma Teenie, as she was called, was in fact a tiny woman, with a soft-spoken Scottish accent, born in Lumphanan, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. No doubt she gathered these stories from her husband Theodore “Thuddie” Cromar, who died in 1930, before my father Charles Jr. was born.

Thuddie, no doubt, heard these tales as a wee lad in Cuttieshillock, Coull, Aberdeenshire, perhaps from his grandfather George Cromar, since his father John had died when he was only a toddler. George was three generations removed from Peter Cromar, a central character in the mystery of Cromar origins covered in my previous post, and he might have heard something first-hand from Peter’s son, Robert Cromar, who died in 1798, when George was about 8 years old.

Eat Poop You Cat!

Family histories have a way of turning into a game of Eat Poop You Cat! after 9 generations and 23 decades. History becomes legend becomes myth. But there is always the seed of truth in these whispers down the lane. Part of my research has debunked some of the family myth, while other parts of the story have been strongly reinforced, though still maddeningly short of definitive documentation via primary source.

I have been able to put together a fairly well-grounded and detailed account of the Cromar and Robb branches of the family tree. I’ve traced the Cromars back to a tantalizing brick wall in the late 1600s that seems to affirm the story of a family who changed their identity to escape some kind of persecution, and may eventually find a connection to that persecution in the Massacre of Glencoe.

The Robbs are, as of this writing, tangled in a documentary web regarding the identity of a William Robb of Aberdeenshire, active in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Robbs seem to have married into a minor cadet branch of a noble family, leading to the regal connections so prized by my grandmother. But further research is needed to keep this from happening to my family story: