Jannet Dun or Janet Dunn or Janet Dune, c. 1720-1770?

Cromars in the Jacobite era

By the time Robert Cromar and Jannet Dun had settled down and started raising a typically large rural Scottish family, the Second Jacobite Rising may have been quelled, but the thirst for a Jacobite revolution had not been quenched, and a third revolt was to culminate in “the Forty-Five” with the ill-fated Battle of Culloden. Much has been written about this tragic day in Scottish history, 16 April 1746, so it won’t be my job to recount that here, but I will digress enough to allow us to explore the impact of this event on the Cromar family.

Scotland was controlled by British-led forces at this time, but for some it comes as a surprise to learn that a good number of soldiers in this occupational army were in fact Scottish. It is critical to remember that this was not a struggle between Britain and Scotland, in the manner of the contemporary row over independence. It was, rather, a battle between those who wished for a Stuart restoration and those who did not. There were allegiances among British, Scottish, and Irish on both sides of that question. This of course meant that many Scots fought against their own kin, father against son, brother against brother, even though the allegiances generally broke down along clan loyalty lines.

Farming, not fighting

The clan of which the Cromars are a sept, Clan Farquharson, was squarely in the Jacobite camp, but the Cromar men were family-oriented poor tenant farmers. Perhaps they felt their lot would have changed in no meaningful way regardless of whether a Stuart or a Hanover occupied the throne? Robert Cromar would have been ripe for conscription at age at 28 in 1745, but we have no record of him involved with the fighting.

Perhaps his wife, Jannet Dun, had a hand in convincing him to serve his family and laird best by farming? It’s hard to fathom what political debates and decisions may have occupied the family table. But of one thing we are certain: Robert and Jannet were busy raising a family when Culloden and its aftermath swept Scotland into chaos.

Jannet (or Janet) Dun (or Dune, or Dunn, or maybe even Don or Doun, or…)

Considering the spotty records that survive this era, as we search for the identity of Jannet Dun it’s not surprising to find a situation such as we encountered with Jannet’s husband Robert Cromar 1717. Add to this the complexity of orthographic variations on names that were legion in this period, and this can become an utterly confounding genealogical study.

Jannet, with at least two spelling variants for her first name, and three or more for her family name, is a perfect case study of this difficulty. Simply type in “Janet Dun” in a name search for a birth in Scotland at Family Search and one can see how incredibly common this name and its variants can be over time. Well over 1000 entries can be counted before less plausible variants like “Jean” begin to crop up. “Janet Dun” seems to be the “Jane Doe” of Scotland! Our Janet could be impossible to definitively identify.

Fortunately, as we mentioned in Robert Cromar 1717’s post, there is a rare gift from the genealogy gods: a birth record that contains both father’s and mother’s identity, for Rebeka Cromar, 1752 in Kincardine O’Neil, the same birth-place as her mother. We also mentioned in that same post, quoted below for convenience:

But this gets kind of tangled as we discover no less than three Janet/Jannet Dun/Dune/Dunn personages born in the same town in 1712, 1714, and 1728. The age of Robert, who we presume is born 1717 or later based on scant evidence, suggests the 1714 Janet as closest in age, but the age of youngest son James, born in 1765, tilts heavily in favor of Janet 1728. More research will be needed to pin this down.

Disparities with Robert’s age

A Janet born in 1712 would be 5 years older than her spouse, and 53 at the birth of her last child. Compare this to the later date, 1728, and she’d be 11 years younger than Robert, while only 37 at James’ birth. A woman’s reproductive years generally stop around age 50 and the odds of conceiving drop dramatically after 40. But an age disparity between husband and wife of over a decade is rare.

We should also keep first-born George Cromar in mind. He is born in 1743, the earliest date for Janet would make her 31 at first birth, while the latest date would make her only 15. While we’re at it, let’s throw in an undocumented marriage date of 1737 into the mix: a 20-year-old Robert is marrying a Janet ranging from 25 to 9. I’ve been discrediting that marriage date as a crowd-sourced assumption without merit or source, but if it’s anywhere close to correct, the later date is appearing less likely. We need more evidence.

Waifs and Strays and rumors and innuendo

So, even though the initial search for Jannet did reveal some orthographic variation, I return to ScotlandsPeople to scour the record with this foremost in mind, but the record reveals no new insights by plugging in variants and using a “fuzzy match” or “variants” filter. After a disheartening session there, I happen across a personal tree titled Waifs and Strays containing a good chunk of the Aberdeenshire Cromar tree, including Peter Cromar, Robert Cromar, and their wives, Janet Bonar and Jannet Dun.

The proprietor of this site, Les Williamson, doesn’t appear to have primary or secondary source backup for some of the claims at his site (which contains hundreds upon hundreds of entries), and this includes unsourced Cromar entries. But he does put forth some intriguing hypotheses.

Williamson’s claims

The first of these suggestions regards Jannet Dun’s date of birth, which the site claims to be circa 1720 in Aboyne. The site also claims an unsourced marriage date of circa 1745 to Robert, with no place specified. Williamson does not included a reference to George as son born 1743 or John born 1755 (an important omission given this John is the direct blood line I’m hypothesizing in this journal), but he does include an assertion of a second marriage by Robert to Margaret Nichol, herself born about 1745. This marriage is claimed in Aboyne on 27 October 1771, when Robert is 55, and yields a son George (a second one?) in September 1772 in Aboyne.

If true, this backs up the claim by Ron Cromar that Robert married a woman named Margaret in 1771, though Ron identifies this Margaret as a Smith, not a Nichol. There is a Family Search record for George 1772 that, predictably, lists conflicting Roberts as father, one 1752 and one undated, but presumably 1717. It seems as though the 1717 date is such an outlier for some that the Family Search community is really reluctant to claim it without further evidence. But if this turns out to be a real marriage and real issue, it has implications for Jannet Dun: she would have passed away sometime prior to the 1771 wedding, aligning with the unsourced claim at a Geneanet tree by Heather Cameron.

The family line-up

The investigation presented here is hardly the stuff of rigorous research, which will have to wait for a now-twice-Covid-delayed visit to Scotland itself. But a preliminary hypothesis is not a bad thing if one is mindful of confirmation bias. In that spirit let’s assume some of the correlations found above are genuine cross-references and not an echo chamber of wishful thinking: what does the family look like at this point? Jannet is mother to most of Robert’s children, and a deceased step-mother to his children with a theoretical second bride, the mysterious (and comparatively very young) Margaret:

Mother	Child	Born	Place	Died	FS	WS	FG	SP	Ot
Jannet	George ¹	1743	Aboyne		●				◼︎
	James ²	1747	Aboyne					●
	Isabel³	1749	Aboyne			●		●
	Robert	1752	Aboyne		●				◼︎
	Rebeca ⁴	1752	Aboyne		●	●		●
	Janet ⁵	1753	Aboyne	1846	●	●	●
	Alexander	1754	Aboyne		●				◼︎
	John	1755	Aboyne		●			●
	Peter ⁶	1757	Aboyne		●	●		●
	Elizabeth ⁷	1763	Aboyne		●	●		●
	James ⁸	1766	Aboyne	1825	●		●	●
Margaret ⁹	George ¹⁰	1772	Aboyne	1829	●	●	●	●
	Alexander ¹¹	1775	Aboyne		●				◼︎

Raw Concatenation of the family of Jannet Dun and Robert Cromar from various sources

KEY

NOTES

1 | Date inferred by witness to christening of Alexander, son of brother Robert.
2 | Only listed at SP, suggests confirmation of a second Robert contemporary to Robert 1717 in Aboyne.
3 | SP record 1749 listed as 1747 at WS.
4 | Confirmed record for both Jannet and Robert, unusual for the time.
5 | Headstone at Kirkton of Aboyne burial ground.
6 | SP records only for marriage and birth of children, no birth record or connection to parents.
7 | SP record for 1763 links to parent George, not Robert.
8 | SP record 1766 listed as 1765 at FS.
9 | Surname Nichol at WS, Smith at FS and in Ron Cromar’s note. Discussion of surname also found in comments on christening record for Alexander 1775.
10 | FG record claims birth 1776 with no documentation, whereas SP confirms 1772.
11 | A controversy at FS assigns Alexander to two sets of Roberts, one wed to Margaret Smith and another to Isobel Ley.

By teasing out and cross-referencing the family line among all these sources, we may begin to understand the mystery of the many Robert Cromars that inhabit this period. However, this post is about Jannet, so we will return to that topic in the next post.

A brood at home in Aboyne

Though we may prove otherwise in said next post, let’s assume for now the entire brood of 11 Cromars listed with Jannet as mother are shared between her and Robert. As rural Aberdeenshire families of the time go, this is not an unlikely mothering career spanning 23 years. If valid, her first son George dates in a range where Jannet is between 23 (if she is born in 1720, according to some undocumented sources) and 29 (if born in 1714, as documented). Her last son James dates between her 46th and 52nd birthdays.

Admittedly, Jannet’s earlier birth date starts to look dubious here, in spite of being documented, and there are some quite tight dates here, especially in the period from 1752 to 1755 in which 5 children are claimed. Even if we discover some of these kids are assigned incorrectly, there’s still a large family.

Kirkton of Aboyne, or elsewhere?

How did that large family live in a village that “never included more than a few straggling cottages of primitive construction,” as John Henderson described Kirkton of Aboyne in Aberdeenshire epitaphs? We’ve recounted places like Milton of Auchlossan, Crossfold, and Cuttieshillock as former Cromar homesteads in the 19th century. Can we pinpoint the presence of the Cromars in the Kirkton of Aboyne area in the 18th?

While Census records starting in 1841 made finding later Cromar dwellings child’s play compared to pinning them down in Jannet’s era, we do have some clues in obscure records. One branch of the family has christening records associated with Muiriha of Drumgask (more recent spellings include Muiryhall and Drumgesk), and there is evidence of a Cromar presence in Dykehead (spelled Dikehead on the map below).

Possible elsewheres

Top left | With Aboyne Castle to the west of Loch of Aboyne at upper right of map, Dikehead can be found traveling further due west past the Castle.
Top right | With Loch of Aboyne and upper left of map, Muiryhall and Drumgesk can be found roughly centered to the east-south-east.
Bottom | A larger scale map to orient these towns to one another. These all have potential for being Cromar domiciles in the mid- to late-18th century. Other possible settlements include Maryfield, Newtown of Drumgesk, Belwade, Oldtown, Rosehill, Heughhead, and the Mains of Aboyne, the model farmstead developed by the Marquess of Huntly. Birse can be seen just to the south of the River Dee and the settlements of Muiryhall and Drumgesk.
All maps screen-captures from Genuki

The current state of these settlements is, unsurprisingly, mixed. Miuryhall is a completely abandoned site, with new development around the village of Aboyne slowly encroaching from the west. Newtown of Drumgest is a bed-and-breakfast, while other properties have been modified or rebuilt on what are evidently the foundations of former dwellings.

From left to right, contemporary images of (top) the Mains of Aboyne, Heughhead, Rosehill, (bottom) Oldtown/Belwade, Maryfield, and Drumgesk… many of which are possible Cromar domiciles in Jannet’s era. | All images screen-captures from Google Street View

Material culture of settlements

We cannot find much more in the record regarding the former states of these potential settlements, but we do have some general knowledge of the time that gives us some idea of how they lived, if not exactly where. At the fascinating website ThatchingInfo.com, we can see the main feature that’s modernized some of the dwellings seen above: the roof. Even older stone and harled-stone structures have received new roofing techniques today, for better and for worse. This website contains some rare vintage images of thatched cottages in and around Aboyne. We know from the record that even larger collective structures such as Saint Adamnan’s Kirk were made of local stone with local materials gathered to create a thatch roof. Though these images date from the late 19th century, it’s likely the look of these dwellings would not feel foreign to the Cromars of the mid-18th century.

These tiny cottages supported large families without a great deal of privacy, often simply split into two rooms with perhaps a loft under the thatch. We don’t have images of the inside of any of these structures but we can share an interesting site near Culloden, the Old Leneach Cottage on the battlefield grounds, which is purported to date from before the battle. Its interior would bear a close resemblance to the material culture we might find in the Cromar’s dwelling.

Left to right: the Old Leneach Cottage at Culloden, and two views of the interior. | All images found at DailyRecord.com

Subsistence living

If one can imagine cooking from raw foodstuffs, cleaning, mending, sewing, birthing, breastfeeding, and tending to farming chores using such a dwelling as the base for all these activities… well, I think it is no understatement that Scottish women such as Jannet were brave indeed! Put romanticism for the past completely aside: would you choose to live and work as she was compelled to do? We often think of the grand castles and estates of the gentry, celebrating them in costume dramas for our entertainment, but the vast majority of folk lived in a subsistence manner.

In our next post, we’ll dig more deeply into the records that will help us understand the actual makeup of the Cromar household, possibly discovering the actual settlements they resided in, and even untangling the unresolved mystery of Jannet’s husband, one of the many, many Robert Cromars of Aboyne.

cromarbaile