I’ve mentioned how the family historian Martin Robb has inspired this journal. He and I have corresponded about the possible association we may have as cousins-X-times-removed through my patrilineal great-grandmother Christiana Berry Robb, and I can only hope my writing is a fraction as insightful as his in my investigations in future posts. Using family history research as a means toward focused study of history at large is just one example of the many things I’ve learned from reading his work. Hopefully without sounding too self-inflating, I can confidently say that, due in no small part to the research I’ve documented here, I know and can share more about the history of Scotland than the average Yank (many of who, I should sadly point out, can’t point out any country on a map, much less identify Scotland, but that’s another topic for another blog).

A critique of family history praxis

Martin has written an insightful critical piece titled On feminism and family history, where he identifies the motivations for indulging in genealogy. Like him, I enjoy uncovering the history of persons who often remain unseen in formal studies, and I see deep social, moral, and political ramifications in so doing. Like him, I enjoy the pleasure of puzzling through the detective work; where some might enjoy sudoku or crosswords; I’ll take confirming a new ancestor any day. I find, like him, that my family study complements well with my professional skills. But, like Martin, I found myself unwittingly adopting the gender bias that plagues genealogy. Martin writes:

… I think I was also influenced by the intrinsically patriarchal nature of family history. As a result of our naming system, whereby women (at least until recently) automatically assumed their husband’s surname on marriage (unlike countries like Spain, where children tend to retain their mother’s as well as their father’s surname), genealogy has tended to focus on tracing the male line in families. Women often feature as something of an adjunct, attracting less interest from genealogists, despite the fact that genetically we are as much the products of our mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers as of our fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers. I have to admit that I was initially as guilty as anyone of this gender bias, obsessed as I was with tracing the Robb line back through the generations, and failing to follow up the women who married into the family, even though they were just as much my ancestors as the men.

In my mind, this is a forgivable sin, given that the bias is intrinsic to a patriarchal naming system that is an unmalleable artifact of history, but only if one is conscious of it and tends to settling arrears by giving the women their due.

Exponential madness

This means we have more work to do. What gets kind of mad here, however, is the sheer volume of work involved with chasing down the rabbit holes of persons to the eighth generation out — this would be one’s sixth great-grandparents, and since the growth is based on an exponential progression, starting with a pair of parents, 2⁸ obligates a search for 64 people at that level.

Add all the levels up and we’re talking research on 126 persons! It’s taken me 16 posts at about 2500 words per post to fully investigate 8 persons — 5000 words for each father down the direct patrilineal line. That in itself is 40,000 words, discounting numerous illustrations and maps. As a plain vanilla book, this would clock in at around 150 pages or so. Throw in maps, images, and an index for good measure, it easily expands to a 200 page publication, or about 25 pages per person. Assuming a depth of record equal for all persons, that amounts to 126 persons X 25 pages/person ÷ 500 pages/book = a boxed set of a half-dozen hard-bound doorstops suitable for gift-wrapping.

So it’s clear that, unless I become a full-time family historian, we’ll have to cherry-pick! However, we should not do so with a bias. Let’s start expanding the field by working back up the tree from the far depths we’ve been able to reach, and honor the Cromar wives who struggled with their families through the Jacobite period.

The Janets

Much as I did for Teenie Robb, my patrilineal great-grandmother, we’ll begin by taking a look at the lives of two Janets: Janet Bonar, the wife of Peter Cromar, and Jannet Dun, wed to Robert Cromar, each in the next two posts. I hope we can uncover insights into their own family lines, without running too far down particular rabbit holes, of course. But I believe this will serve the social, moral, and political dimensions that I outlined above, illuminating how the occupation “farmer’s wife” (as it’s condescendingly labeled in the Census Records) actually played out for these women.

We’ll identify how the struggles of the Cromar men, toiling day to day as farmers, stone-masons, quarrymen, and merchants, all bravely and often quixotically aiming to better their economic lot and break the shackles of rigid social hierarchies, are met with no less effort and bravery on the part of the Cromar women. The Janets, and the women who precede and follow them, will reveal the relationships they have with childbirth and child-rearing, which in their time dominated women’s lives and often led to their early demise. They will demonstrate the constraints of occupational segregation on the lives of Scottish women, and how collective effort was organized around jobs such as laboring in a bandwin or waulking woolen cloth. We’ll see how these roles evolve with the history of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions that the Cromar family lived through by comparing later lives with the Janets.

Independent Scottish women

One notable advantage the Scottish genealogist has over many others is the independent streak of Scottish women. Among other things, this meant that they kept their maiden name at marriage. Instead of being absorbed by the male’s family, the females kept a direct record of their kinship in their names. This makes it a far simpler matter to find the Duns and the Bonars without resorting to detective work among marriage records. So, as we worked down the chain with the men, let us now work back up with the women!