Many names

Where the previous post debated the merits of a one-name study for the Cromar family, this one takes on the reality that “one-name” is an abstraction. Like anyone else on earth, Cromars are intertwined with a vast array of family lines, but given the close-knit nature of communities bound by geography and technology, we observe certain lines connect more persistently than others. In my case, the Cromar-Robb line from which my paternal grandfather emerged represents just one instance in a larger array of relationships the progeny of Peter Cromar 1690 enjoyed with a network of Robbs over time. In addition to my great-grandmother Christiana Berry Robb (from Lumphanan, later Glenmuick near Ballater) marrying great-grandfather Theodore James Cromar (from Aberdeen, later Coull, later still Aboyne), we have so far uncovered:

Cromar-Robb couples

• Catherine Cromar 4.1 (2nd cousin 5x removed) 1820 Lumphanan m. James Robb 1809 Midmar
• John Durward 6.1 (3rd cousin 3x removed) 1830 Leochel-Cushnie m. Elizabeth Robb 1835 Foveran
• Jessie Florence 7.4 (4th cousin 2x removed) 1880 Aberdeenshire m. David MacKay Robb 1876 Aberdeen

Whether these Robbs may be as closely related as the Cromar progeny are is a question only future study will answer, though I suspect tracing them to a single progenitor is an unlikely outcome based on the geographic conclusions drawn in my previous post. The Robbs in this tiny sample range from Glenmuick in the west to Aberdeen on the east coast, and as far north as Foveran — a widely dispersed group! This dispersion only grows as Cromar-Robb families join the Scottish Diaspora, some (like mine) to America, others to Canada, still others even farther afield.

Of course, as we start to include lines other than the Robbs that also grow like vines along the trunk of Peter Cromar’s descendancy, we encounter a massive amount of data — dates, names, geographies, instances of immigration. We need some kind of filter to grapple with it all, some system that allows the formation of a coherent narrative. Fortunately, there exists such a system.

Allies and associates…

Within genealogy, I have encountered several terms of art that represent a way to organize families, creating a useful hierarchy out of a sea of names. A direct line is based on progeny and describes parent-child kinship and levels thereof, including grandparents and great-grandparents. An allied line refers specifically to non-progenic direct kinship: a sibling, aunt, uncle, or cousin. An associated line refers to a union such as a marriage, which is important but less direct than kinship.

The distinctions are subtle but critical to understanding the roles played within a family history. For example, my grandmother Christiana Berry Robb is a direct line ancestor, even though her name is not Cromar. Her sister Mary Ann Robb, my great-aunt, is an ally, as is the above-mentioned Catherine Cromar, a second cousin five-times removed. Catherine’s husband James Robb is an associate. So the Robbs fall into all three categories for me, suggesting an intimate relationship between Cromars and Robbs across time and place.

How do other names encountered in the descendancy study fare in this schema? Well, keeping in mind this is still very much a work in progress, with more than half out of an anticipated 4000 to 5000 total entries complete as of this writing, I’m not ready for a comprehensive accounting. Some preliminary findings nevertheless prove interesting enough to publish now, and while numbers will increase, proportional distributions are probably pretty accurate given the large sample size.

Overview

Raw database work can get pretty tedious, so I will spare recounting the entire contents of the gigantic spreadsheet (though if you are as nerdy as I am, you can find it here). As of this post, here are some interesting highlights:

• There are 512 unique surname instances in the database.
• Of those, a massive number are minor allied or, more often, associated lines: 220 surnames are represented by one person only, and 156 surnames are represented by only two persons. Altogether, less than 20% of the whole tree population occupies more than 73% of all the surnames, made up largely of parents-in-law of cousins’ wives.
• The remaining 136, about 27% of total surnames, are occupied by more than 80% of the whole tree population.
• Thirty of these, only about 6% of total surnames, account for over 52% of the whole tree population.
• One name, unsurprisingly, dominates: Cromars, over 570 of them and counting, occupy over 22.5% of the whole tree population. Twelve are in my direct line, over 550 are allies, and 5 are associates representing “missing link” Cromars marrying into my direct line.
• The next largest surname groups, in descending order:

Surname groups

Surname	Direct	allied	associate	total	percent
Milne	1	79	14	94	3.70%
Buckner		57	2	59	2.32%
Adam | Adams		39	9	48	1.89%
Robb	4	20	19	43	1.69%
Grassich | Grassick		32	6	38	1.49%
Christie		30	7	37	1.45%
Durward		29	2	31	1.22%
Gowie		27	4	31	1.22%
Florence		27	2	29	1.14%
Esson		21	6	27	1.06%
MacPherson | McPherson		18	6	24	0.94%
McCondach		19	3	22	0.87%
Donal | Donald		18	3	21	0.83%
Wright		11	9	20	0.79%
Jameson | Jamieson		13	6	19	0.75%
McHardy		16	3	19	0.75%
Merchant		16	2	18	0.71%
Heath		13	3	16	0.63%
Cameron		12	3	15	0.59%
Cruickshank | Cruikshank		11	4	15	0.59%
Leslie | Lesly		11	4	15	0.59%
Wilson		1	14	15	0.59%
Archibald		11	3	14	0.55%
Birse | Birss		10	4	14	0.55%
Black		11	3	14	0.55%
Eales		12	2	14	0.55%
Gordon		2	12	14	0.55%
Greig		9	5	14	0.55%
Law		8	6	14	0.55%
Taylor		7	7	14	0.55%

What happened?

Wait: the Robbs only come in fourth place? After Milnes, Buckners, and Adamses? Who are these people? Isn’t this study the Cromar-Robb study? Unpacking the data will reveal patterns that explain the outsized influence of other families.

In blue above, we see the number of persons within a surname that occupy a place on my direct line, and in that category, the Robbs are second only to the Cromars. Allies, in red, being aunts, uncles, and cousins not in the direct line, show the influence of male lines marrying into the Cromar line. There are proportionally far fewer of those in the Robb stack. Notice also the proportionally larger number of associate lines in yellow belonging to the Robbs, an indicator of female lines marrying into Cromar line families and themselves bearing allied members of the line. It will be interesting to see how these trends fare as we complete the work, keeping in mind that I’ve yet to take as deep a dive down the Robb line as I’ve accomplished along the Cromar line.

… in the Scottish Diaspora

Two panels from the Scottish Diaspora Tapestry, a collaborative project conceived by artist Andrew Crummy celebrating the global impact of the Diaspora.
1 | The Global Panel expresses the range of the Diaspora across every continent.
2 | The panel expressing Wisconsin celebrates the same kind of Granite Men my great-grandfather was proud to be.
Images from The Scottish Diaspora Tapestry

It’s interesting to note that some of our surnames are decidedly not Scottish in origin. Many are English or Welsh, with an occasional Italian, German, Russian, and Indian surname thrown in for good measure. In some instances — the Rasals from India who will show up along Ron Cromar’s branch — they may indicate adoption. In others — the Eales branch marrying into the surname Butz while in Russia — we observe a family who is evidently not emigrating, but may be serving the United Kingdom in some diplomatic capacity. And in yet others — the Campedonica family marrying into the large Gowie branch of the Cromar line, for example — we see an immigrant settling into Scotland.

All of these are exceptions to the rule, however: the overwhelming majority of alliances and associations occur as a function of the Scottish Diaspora. This is the experience of my branch of the Cromar line. We have occupied places from Boston to Winston-Salem along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, a result of my great-grandparents Thuddie and Teenie attempting to escape the economic deprivations of late 19th Century Scotland, only to run headlong into the Great Depression that abruptly ended Thuddie’s stone-masonry contracting business.

Distribution

While it’s far too early in the ongoing work to make a comprehensive study of this, it’s already evident that Cromars, allies, and associates span the globe as a function of our participation in the Diaspora. Here, we’ll just take a broad glance at the top five surnames in the line: Cromar, Milne, Buckner, Adams, and Robb, using our data combined with the map at Forebears:

Distribution of surnames

• Cromar | Nearly twice as many incidences of Cromar are found in North America — about 500 in the US and Canada — as in Scotland itself, and over 200 in the rest of the UK. A surprising number are found in Thailand — is this a migration of the Rasal line from India? — and a respectable presence is found in Australia and New Zealand.
• Milne | They are legion in Scotland with over 11,000 instances recorded, but Australia is nearly equally awash in Milnes with over 10,000. Large cohorts in the rest of the UK, Ireland, North America, New Zealand, and South Africa, but a surprise here is the number in Argentina.
• Buckner | An English surname that may have German roots, the Buckners enter the Cromar line when Benjamin Buckner marries Diana Craigmile, daughter of Elizabeth Cromar 1755. This marriage in 1799, combined with a large production of sons, help propagate the Buckners as a Cromar branch. Distribution follows a similar pattern to the above, but with a surprising presence in Togo and Ghana, countries in the former UK Gold Coast colonial territory.
• Adam/Adams | Nope, ours isn’t the line associated with the early United States Presidents. An extremely common English surname entering the Cromar line in the early 1800s, most of “our” Adams line is historically found near the porous border between south-eastern Michigan and southern Ottawa. Similar world-wide distribution to the above, but with unique concentrations in Brazil and Nigeria, a former UK colony.
• Robb | USA Robbs outnumber Scots more than 4-to-1, but a surprise here is that Australian Robbs outnumber Canadians. Patterns of world distribution mirror the other families, but a large concentration of Robbs is discovered in Jamaica, a country historically tied to Scotland as a penal colony for unrepentant Jacobites. There are over 19,000 Robbs compared to just over 400 Cromars in the USA.

A wide range

I’m struck by the Diaspora’s range, which of course correlates with the UK’s dominance as an empire. This journal is niche and quite modest — garnering only about two thousand views by about 500 unique visitors in just under a year as of this writing — but I’m also struck (and gratified) by how closely the readership of this blog correlates to the global distributions described above.

With the exception of a couple of outlier countries, this map could be reasonably confused with a map of the Scottish Diaspora itself!

Mapping

Speaking of mapping, a particular interest of mine as a data visualization wonk, Forebears has certainly been indispensable for preliminary study of geographical distribution, even getting into granular provincial detail in select countries. One can really confirm what late-generation patterns of migration indicate in a descendancy study. It’s premature for me to develop a study of this within the Cromar-Robb line, but I’m considering a heat-map of emigration similar to the Cromar-Robb habitation map I developed for the Howe of Cromar. Until then, we have to satisfy our curiosity with Forbears. It’s really fun to look at Scotland, England, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the USA to pinpoint the locations of distant cousins by state, shire, or province. As an example here, let’s look at the distribution by state in the USA:

Distribution in the USA of the Cromar surname in 2014. | Screen-capture from Forebears

To us Cromars on the Eastern Seaboard, this map is a bit humbling. We play a relatively minor role in the Cromar emigration story! The presence of Cromars in the upper Midwest and West came as a real surprise to me as the descendancy study has unfolded. Utah, really? How did that come to be a primary center of Cromar distribution in the New World?

Scotland and “the most American religion”

1 | Isabella Niven, who married Alexander Ramsay Cromar
2 | Her son, William Tweedie Cromar
Images by contributors ckoelliker4105232 and 18KBC at Family Search

Jane Cromar and William Tweedie Cromar, my third cousins three time removed, sixth-generation progeny of Peter Cromar 1690, and grandchildren of the noted schoolmaster George Cromar moved along with their families to Utah in the early 1860s. They were accompanied by their mother, Isabella Niven Cromar Walker, who had remarried after their father Alexander Ramsay Cromar had passed. Isabella had lost her second husband by the time the family left Scotland. The reason for this unusual emigration took me quite by surprise: they were Scottish devotees of Mormonism.

Before my encounter with Jane, William, and their families, I was completely unaware that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Scotland was even remotely a thing. My admittedly limited knowledge of the LDS had led me to think of it as an expression of religious belief peculiar to America (which, in fairness to the LDS, is a country that is quite peculiar about religion generally). Writing in the Atlantic, McKay Coppins summarizes this perception better than I can:

The church that Joseph Smith set about building was almost achingly American. He held up the Constitution as a quasi-canonical work of providence. He published a new sacred text, the Book of Mormon, that centered on Jesus visiting the ancient Americas. He even taught that God had brought about the American Revolution so that his Church could be restored in a free country—thus linking Mormonism’s success to that of the American experiment.

McKay Coppins, The Most American Religion

How an affiliation with the LDS helped this study

It may be easy to poke fun at the LDS, as Coppins points out, but I’m not one to judge how a Being who transcends our understanding of time and space so profoundly that we cannot even fathom Its existence may be dealt with by our simian brains. But I’ll admit to not a small amount of profound skepticism regarding some of the more outlandish tenets of LDS theology: let’s just say my ego is not so fragile as to need the assurance that I will be a god after I die and, as is jokingly put forth in popular culture, have dominion over my own personal planet.

However, my own opinions regarding the LDS movement have no bearing on the historical fact that it gained a missionary toe-hold in Scotland. A remarkably large number of Scots converted and made a permanent pilgrimage to Salt Lake City and environs, including this portion of the Cromar family. A few of the people I count as collaborators on the Cromar family history are the descendants of William Tweedie.

In fact, it may that the Mormonization of one branch of the family led to the massive amount of information available about the Cromars. I note that many lines in our non-Cromar allied and associated families peter out relatively quickly in the Family Search mega-tree (which, it should be pointed out, is maintained by the LDS). The LDS movement is devoted to genealogical study, apparently in support of its controversial practice of proxy baptism. So when some Cromars became Mormons, they scoured the world for other Cromars.

Epilogue

While that “most American of religions” is of little interest to me as a theological construct, I can say for certain that I’m grateful for the inadvertent collaboration it has allowed in the construction of this family history and the exploration of the Scottish Diaspora. As I continue the genealogical journey alongside my professional work which occasionally brings me to Scotland itself, I see the Diaspora turning full circle. Each time I return, it does feel like a homecoming of sorts, a reality among members of the Diaspora recognized by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, which has conducted research into Scottish emigration and identity in regards to the ongoing debate about Scotland’s independence.

What started as a small work-in-progress report at the midpoint of compiling the descendancy study turned into a 4 part mini-series. Because I’m always a bit frustrated or disappointed in how massive datasets like this study are expressed visually, the fifth and final part in this series will investigate metaphors in data visualization.

There may, however, be a bit of a hiatus in posting for a spell — it’s the silly season at school and there’s too much to do!