I’m hazarding a guess that Ron Cromar passed away around 2016 or not long thereafter, based on the dates of internet accounts and chatroom activity that I’ve run across in my research. In the 2012 article accompanying the picture above, it mentions that he was living and working in Banchory, well east of Aboyne but near enough, and that he was retiring from the retail trade at 77, meaning he was born in 1935. So he may have died in his early 80s. If alive today, he’d be 86.

Ron was evidently quite a character. This comes through in the photo, as well as in cheeky internet chatroom posts. At the Session, a site devoted to Irish Celtic music, he says, “Well I don’t really play any instrument but the fact is I am the son of Margaret Cromar and the Old Blind Dogs are great friends of mine…” The in-joke here is a reference to a recording of the waltz Margaret Cromar by the band — play it here. Margaret was indeed Ron’s mum, so that made him a member by proxy.

A correspondence

Ron and I never met, but we had a brief email correspondence a long while ago. Social media was not yet the monster that destroyed the internet, which was far better behaved as a toddler than it does now as a thirty-something. Email still felt somewhat useful, and getting a message from a person in Scotland was an exotic rarity. We exchanged pleasantries and pictures, and I think he was a little disappointed that I was not a ginger Cromar like himself. Put that down to being watered down by Sassenach blood, I guess — though if I’m to trust the DNA analysis at Ancestry, a combination of Norse and Scottish blood would make me about two-thirds a Scot. Alba gu bràth!

Alas, I was young then and therefore a punk and a fool, so I didn’t really keep up with Ron’s correspondence. What the hell did we have in common other than a last name? What I didn’t realize until decades later is that a shared name means a shared history, and having a history means that you are part of something larger than yourself, that things don’t begin and end with you.

We mitigate the inevitability of our our individual deaths with our understanding that, because our families came from somewhere, they are bound to be going somewhere. When we mourn our own deaths, we really mourn the experience of that future with them. We mourn the knowing. I think it odd that we don’t often speak of mourning the time before our births, and the loss of a shared experience of time past, which history is a means of living vicariously.

Researching our roots

That’s the impulse that I suppose drove me to research my roots, as it must have been for Ron. I was always enamored of the Scottish heritage my grandmother would brag about, even though it was inherited largely through my grandfather. She liked the idea we were linked, however tenuously or aspirationally, to ancient Scottish royalty. Mostly I just enjoyed the vague notion I was identified somehow with this scrappy, idiosyncratic country that punches above its weight, and I appreciated the paraphernalia associated with it: the food, the drink, the kilts, the pipes and drums, the heraldry and flags, the impossible spellings in a language which I’m still trying to learn — everything, really, except golf. I really, really suck at golf.

I never dreamed I’d have the opportunity to do much more that be an Albaphile from afar, so it would come as a surprise to my younger self that I now travel to Scotland on a regular basis as part of my professional activities, allowing me to concretize a formerly nebulous relationship with my spirit country. While there, I can find and visit places of significance to my ancestors, and when home, I can do so virtually as an armchair tourist using the amazing resources of the web. Of late, that’s been my only option as we’ve cancelled our study abroad program numerous times under the influence of the pandemic. This has limited the scope of what I can do to find legitimate sources to reconstruct my family history and be a part of that something larger which such pursuit allows.

Ron’s great gift

That’s why I was recently pleased — honored and humbled, really — to receive a great gift in the lifetime of genealogical work done by Ron, generously shared by another distant cousin I’ve mentioned before: Paul Smillie. I’ve been corresponding with him, along with his Dundee cousin (and therefore mine as well) Louise Rankin and her husband Michael. Paul recently spent heaven knows how much effort to digitize more than 30 pages of Ron’s research and sent it to me. When I originally heard about these notes, I certainly expected a few interesting tidbits.

To my surprise, it’s a massive database that reveals much more than just the Scottish roots of the Cromars. It’s a key that unlocks the mystery of the Cromar diaspora, which includes not only the North American, Australian, South African, and Neozealandic meanderings of which I was aware, but forays into St. Petersburg, Russia and Mumbai, India that I had no clue existed. It therefore not only provides a record of the Cromar past, but a platform for speculating about its future across the globe.

Ron’s line

I am an extremely distant cousin to Ron, according to his rather enigmatic entry in his own database. Born 11 Jul 1935 in Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, Ron was the son of Herbert William Cromar, born 1897 in Birse, and Herbert’s second wife, Margaret Anne Meldrum Florence, born 1911 in East Cranloch, Glen of Foundland, Insch, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. She’s the Margaret in the waltz! Ron’s patrilineal descent from Peter 1690 is as follows:

• Peter Cromar 1690-1770 Kirkton of Aboyne
• Peter Cromar 1733-1815 Kirkton of Aboyne
• Peter Cromar 1773- Lumphanan
• Robert Cromar 1793-1858 Kirkton of Aboyne
• Robert Sherrat Cromar 1826-1910 Kirkton of Aboyne
• Robert Cromar 1862-1944 Glenmuick
• Herbert William Cromar 1897-1976 Aberdeen

Our lines split way back at the first generation out from Peter 1690, with Ron’s fourth great-grandfather Peter being brother to my fifth great-grandfather Robert 1717. As a ridiculously amateur genealogist, I can’t hope to calculate the cousins-removed, so I will leave that to the algorithms of family-tree software to reveal, but by comparison my patrilineal line is:

• Peter Cromar 1690-1770 Kirkton of Aboyne
• Robert Cromar 1717-1789 Kirkton of Aboyne
• John Cromar 1760- Aboyne
• George Cromar 1792-1871 Lumphanan
• John Cromar 1823-1870 Lumphanan
• Theodore James Cromar 1868-1930 Saint Nicholas, Aberdeen
• Charles Robb Cromar 1907-1982 Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Charles Robb Cromar 1937- Richmond, Virginia, USA

Our uncles, aunts, and cousins stayed in the orbit of the Howe from Peter’s time up until Theodore’s emigration in 1891, so the Cromars had close familial ties there for two centuries.

Comparing notes

Paul’s own research had uncovered some inconsistencies in Ron’s, in particular with regard to the identities of various John Cromars, which he detailed in the email message that accompanied Ron’s notes. I mentioned this in my previous post, and I’ll reiterate that I think both Paul and I understand the hypothetical nature of any family tree. Neither of us, I believe, take a critical stance toward Ron’s work that disrespects it.

With Paul’s and Ron’s contributions, I’ve also synthesized the work done by Kevin Cromar on the identities of the various confusing Roberts. So what I present here is a collaboration across space and time of four researchers, including myself. How did I arrive at my conclusions?

Sorting sources

I needed a means to keep track of and cross-reference all these confusing lists, so I first built a weedy spreadsheet, available here, and titled Comparisons among Cromar sources. If you haven’t read other posts in this journal, the material here will be quite obscure, but if you’ve encountered my posts about all the Johns and Roberts, you’ll know what’s going on. The gist of it is: no one source, either among the four Cromar collaborators mentioned above or in trustworthy public databases like Family Search, has quite got the Cromars right, and because a family tree is a hypothesis, no one may ever quite do so.

However, knowing this, we can collectively arrive at the best possible hypothesis to date, and that is my mission. Ron’s database becomes the backbone for it all. Paul’s observations provide needed corrections for the Johns. Kevin’s data provides clarification for the muddy Roberts. My contribution is to graft our Eastern United States presence onto the resulting trunk. Once this effort is complete, and only then, will I feel confident to make the changes at Family Search that will conform to this hypothesis. I’ve attempted to reach out to some of the users that I can see making revisions there, but I haven’t yet received a response. I don’t want to over-write their efforts without providing them with knowledge about all this work — this lack of coordination is evidently what led to the massive confusion surrounding the Jacobite and post-Jacobite Roberts that Kevin began to clean up.

Formatting data

After the spreadsheet comparison, I tackled Ron’s database formatting. The document was a PDF of a scanned printed paper original, and therefore not “readable”: the pages were pictures, really. Fortunately, it’s a lightweight task to run such images through OCR (optical character recognition) software and convert images of printed text into digitally encoded text as a shortcut to manually performing data entry. OCR allows anyone to do this in a flash, but it’s not perfect. Searching the resulting encoded text for algorithmic mis-readings is a matter of simple find-and-replace strategies which, while necessarily manual in nature, are not time-consuming. Where there was an occasional hand-written note on the page, I transcribed them to text [**which I italicized and placed inside rectangular brackets with asterisks as you see here **].

Once the database was encoded, it was time to synthesize. To accomplish this, I created a side-by-side table in a document, with Ron’s original notes unedited in the left column, and my synthesis in the right. In my version:

• Paul’s notes about Johns and Kevin’s notes about Roberts created some havoc. In one instance, we bifurcate Robert 1717 and his son Robert 1752, which Ron did not recognize as two people and simply conflated into one Robert 1717. This pushed George 1772 (the schoolmaster of Birse) and his brother Alexander 1775 up an entire generation. To indicate that shift, I used text highlighted in green.
• To indicate other corrections and additions to the database, I used text highlighted in red.
• To indicate places where the database could not be confirmed by record, I used text highlighted in blue.
• Notes indicating background information about why change occurs [are placed in rectangular brackets thusly].

A new numbering system

Finally, a note on the numbering system. When I first received Ron’s notes, it appeared he was using an anentafel numbering system, but on further inspection, his was a useful if idiosyncratic scheme whereby he simply assigned a number to a person. I changed this, for better or worse. The database does not lend itself to a pure anentafel system, as it carries more than one bloodline. I used a system similar to that used by software developers to designate a generation of software, like MacOS 12.2 or Windows 11. The first number represents a generation away from Peter 1690, who constitutes Generation 1. The number after the decimal represents the person’s birth order. Thus, Robert 1717, first son of Peter 1, is designated Robert 2.1.

This isn’t perfect, and I’ve not seen anyone else do this, so it perhaps does not reflect “best practice” in the genealogy community, but it works well for me, at least when I supplement it, as Ron did, with a quick parenthetical patrilineal notation, like this: Robert 2.1 (Peter 1).

So with all that as an introduction, I offer the following:

• Ron Cromar – written history of Peter Cromar 1690 | A PDF with OCR conversion from Paul Smilie’s original document.
• Descendants of Peter Cromar 1690 | Ron Cromar | A transcription of the above document into a shared Google Doc.
• Descendants of Peter Cromar 1690 | Ron Cromar with updates by williamCromar | A side-by-side comparison of Ron’s original database with proposed revisions by me, including edits based on research by Paul Smilie and Kevin Cromar.

Next steps

That last document is an active, ongoing effort, and will likely change as I put the data under the microscope of primary source confirmation. The next steps will be the following:

• Creation of a hypothetical tree at Ancestry | This will not be a publicly accessible document, though I will share it with anyone who has an Ancestry account if requested. I’m using their convenient cloud-based software to test the relationships in the list above in family-tree formats, both pedigree and family. This will eventually export to a GEDCOM file which I can share more flexibly. Watch this space.
• Revisions to the shared tree at Family Search | Once I am certain we have the best possible hypothesis based on the best research feasible, I will begin revising and correcting entries at the crowdsourced Family Search site, using my personal tree above as a guide.
• Revisions to map: Howe of Cromar | Aberdeenshire Cromars and Robbs | This map currently places people along my bloodline in generic positions in Lumphanan, Aboyne, and the like. With more precise location information gleaned from all this research, locations for family events may be pinpointed with a high degree of precision. I will be supplementing this with a second map, one that shows the Cromar-Robb line in the Eastern United States.

Passing it on

Though I know Ron is no longer here to see the results, I’m sure he’d be pleased. The seed he planted long ago with his email to me is bearing fruit, and the work he started is continuing and improving, keeping our humble ancestors safe “from the enormous condescension of posterity” as Martin Robb, quoting E. P,. Thomson, has eloquently described the task of compiling a family history.

In the next post, we’ll return to our climb up the ladder to revisit Ann Meston, wife of the star-crossed George Cromar.