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Thuddie and Teenie in the New World
Boston My Virginian ancestry is a fact over which I harbor little obsession, likely because my formative years were spent in New England. I attended grade school in communities like Chelmsford, Massachusetts and Nashua, New Hampshire, the Granite State. I ate ice cream as New Englanders are fond of doing: standing outside, in winter. Most…
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Theodore James Cromar 1868-1930
The “Granite Men” of Aberdeen Aberdeen is known as the Granite City, and earned that honorific on the strength of a granite industry that built so much more than Aberdeen itself. Cities in the U.K. and internationally depended on the export of granite from Aberdeenshire, along with the stonemasons that were expert at cutting and…
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Competing theories on the “How” of Cromar
Family mythology An enduring part of the family mythology and the central concern of this exploration is the manner by which the Cromar family came to be the Cromars. Evidently, sometime around the end of the 17th Century, the escape of some variety of persecution—religious, or perhaps political or legal, the story would shift sometimes—was…
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The Backstory
Every good story has an origin myth, a meta-story that leads up to the major plot and fills in important details about the main characters and their circumstances. Since a backstory helps develop a fully realized fictional story world, surely it must be so for factual tales. So… Charles “Big Honey” Robb Cromar Sr. and…
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Mystery in the Howe of Cromar
Howe is a Scots term meaning “valley” or “hollow.” The Howe of Cromar is an enigmatic and distinctive oval impression in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and can easily be seen in a satellite image map. It is the ancestral home of the Cromar and Robb families, representing the pure Scottish roots of my paternal grandfather. My father…
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Welcome to Cromarbaile!
Cromarbaile is the successor site to Cromarville, founded in May 2021 to document travel and research activities into the origins of my family in Scotland. We “emigrated” from our old website in May 2023. If you’re new in town, visit About, then visit the Directory to peruse posts in three categories: Family History + Genealogy,…
