Six months

Six months to the day after I received Ron Cromar’s notes from Paul Smillie, I finalized the descendancy study for our progenitor Peter Cromar. If you wish to cut right to the chase and see the results, you’ll notice a new link in the menu above: Database. As of this writing, the compilation lives in a plain vanilla website with all deceased persons and their relationships, places, and events, organized by individual, by surname, and by family group. This particular expression of the data was built using Gramps, a free (as in speech) open source software project. I’ll discuss my admittedly limited experience with Gramps thus far in more detail below.

Although my original intention was to create the database and share it as a GEDCOM file, I decided the website was better for two important reasons. Firstly, there are a lot of living people in the database. Not only is it just impolite to publish a living person’s data, but it can also quite rightly get you into legal disputes. Gramps contains a handy algorithm that allows you to keep living person’s data unseen on the website. Secondly, the website can use the power of hyperlinks to reveal a rich web of relationships, which a raw database can’t do.

Mysteries solved, mysteries created

To accomplish this feat in six months is blindingly fast, and I have the Internet, a massive cultural interest in genealogy, some family-history-obsessed LDS distant cousins, and my own obsessive-compulsiveness to thank for it. In that time, what did I learn?

Well, I certainly haven’t been able to fulfill the founding purpose of this blog by solving the mystery of Peter’s origins. I haven’t given up on that quest — it famously took Mark Humphrys 35 years to solve the big mystery in his family tree, whereas I’ve only been at this in earnest for about a year. Having said that, I have been able to do the next best thing and figure out where Peter Cromar’s legacy went: from Aberdeenshire to the four corners of the globe.

A family of the Scottish Diaspora

Most of the places where his direct-line descendants landed are along the well-known pathways of the Scottish Diaspora: North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. However, some are surprising: a presence in India and pre-revolutionary Russia, for starters. And some of the reasons why migration happened are entirely unexpected: the largest swath of descendants derive from a branch of the family that emigrated to Utah under the thrall of Mormonism and married into the direct line of Brigham Young (which, no offense, seems like it would be hard not to do in Utah).

Surprising also is the large cohort who ended up in Michigan and demonstrate the very porous boundary between that state and Canada, evidenced by place patterns of marriage, child-bearing, and death. It’s a bit humbling, but East Coast Cromars like me are bit players in this drama, which may explain why Paul and his relations back in Scotland were largely unaware of Theodore James Cromar and his offspring until I began working with them.

Ron Cromar’s passing discovered

Along the way, I unexpectedly solved a few mysteries. Ron Cromar’s passing, it turns out, was in 2019. This broke my heart, of course. We had last traveled to Scotland in 2018! Had I started this work just a few years earlier, I could have rebuilt the bridge to Ron, shaken his hand, and carried forward some knowledge he took with him to the great genealogy chart in the sky. Given his passion for connecting with family, I’m sure this would have pleased him greatly. Another mystery is explained by the large branch that ended up in the orbit of Dundee, which means that I have many more cousins in that area than Louise Rankin, who I hope to meet up with this November. Others will no doubt reveal themselves as I parse the data and transform it from raw information into real story-telling.

By the numbers

But heavens, what a set of data to parse! The six months it took to compile may pale in comparison to the work it will take to analyze. As we dive deeper, we’ll be able to tell stories of various direct-descent branches — the Cromars of Utah and California, the Donals and Van Alstines of Michigan, the Milnes of Vermont, the Buckners of Massachusetts, the Durwards and McHardys of Dundee, the Taylors of Oregon and Washington, the Whytes of Australia, and more Cromars in South Africa and New Zealand. Until I can write with any eloquence about these stories, we’ll settle for some first round broad strokes, by the numbers as parsed using Gramps software.

Before we do so, it bears noting that these numbers account for only those folks that are in the record. There are many descendants who will remain lost to history. There are still others who, being alive today and not showing up in public documents such as obituaries, can’t be accounted for. So even though I was able discover nearly 5000 descendants, associates, and allies in the Peter Cromar line, there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, that are not present in the database. So with that caveat, here are the broad numbers:

Summary of big data

• Number of individuals: 4967
• Males: 2529
• Females: 2436
• Unknown (infant death at childbirth): 2
• Number of family groups by marriage or partnership: 1888
• Number of individuals in the direct line for Peter Cromar: 2316
• Number of recorded places: 2540

The top 20 unique surname instances, which make up about 30% of the total database and carry over 80% of the direct line descendants, include:

Cromar	739
Milne	123
Buckner	77
McHardy	50
Taylor	49
Archibald	48
Robb	44
Black	42
Christie	41
Adams	40
Florence	39
Durward	35
Grassick	35
Davidson	33
Esson	32
Gowie	31
Smith	31
Wright	29
McPherson	28
Ross	27

A brief review of Gramps

I was fortunate not to have to hand-count all those figures! As I mentioned earlier, this and a great deal more data was processed by feeding it into Gramps genealogy software. Gramps is a somewhat forced acronym for Genealogical Research and Analysis Management Programming System. But hey, it’s free and open-source.

I’m always a champion for open source solutions in the abstract, but I’d have to say my initial encounter with Gramps has been decidedly mixed. It wants to be “a genealogy program that is both intuitive for hobbyists and feature-complete for professional genealogists” in their mission statement, and as open-source projects go, it’s trying really hard. But like many projects of this nature, it loses itself in its own weeds. It really feels like an early beta release of the program it wants to be, even though it’s most recent release is 5.1.5.

Intuitive?

I’m going to keep banging away at some of the functionality that is deemed to be “add-ons” or “plug-ins” from third parties, but I have to say the wiki that describes the workflow for adding some things that I would consider core features (like a descendant count function) is rather, well, Linux-y. Not exactly “intuitive for hobbyists,” in other words.

Another frustration that leaves you mumbling “I’d really rather be doing my research than spending so much time figuring out how this program wants me to work” under your breath is the Geography section, which mapifies standardized place names. The wiki copiously documents the process for attaching the required latitude-longitude data for place names so that it can be expressed on a graphical map, but I’ll be damned if I have yet to see a pin drop on this map.

Not that you really want to see one of those pins:

Yes, Gramps falls consistently short in a category that’s pretty close to my heart. Data visualization is not something I’ll be using this program for any time soon.

Still, I’m not giving up on Gramps. It is a robust data management tool, and once I get past the bumps, I’m certain it will provide the amazing results it promises. I’m not afraid of a high learning curve. I’m just a bit surprised that this software has one that is quite as steep is it is, given its ambitions.