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The trouble with GEDCOM
A school of red herring in a sea of bias The vitriol spewing forth from the mouths of this year’s edition of authoritarian U.S. presidential candidates is a veritable school of red herring swimming in a vast sea of bias. We have actual problems to solve that this gang is deliberately avoiding. There is a…
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Digitizing the 1696 Aberdeenshire Poll Book: Volume 2 complete!
For an account of Volume 1 and the development of the searchable database, visitDigitizing data from the 1696 Aberdeenshire Poll Book Voilá! Or, perhaps more appropriately in Scots Gaelic: Mar sin! My Canadian cousins have completed the digitization of the List of Pollable Persons within the Shire of Aberdeen. The data for Volume 2 is…
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Digitizing data from the 1696 Aberdeenshire Poll Book
Title page, List of Pollable Persons within the Shire of Aberdeen. 1696. Volume Second., printed in Aberdeen by William Bennett on behalf of the Spaulding Club in 1844 | Internet Archive The poll tax When we hear of a poll tax in the United States, thoughts turn to our sordid history of Jim Crow systemic…
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Migrations II: first forays out from Aboyne
A guilty pleasure I’ve made no secret of one of my deeply guilty pleasures: watching Outlander. You’ll find this show somewhere in a demonic Venn diagram intersecting Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, World on Fire, and H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, with some generic beach-read romance novel love scenes bordering on female-gaze porn thrown…
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Bonars in the 1696 Poll Book: a deeper understanding of Janet’s origins?
I received an interesting message from Jessica McDonald in Canada a couple of weeks ago, detailing an analysis she and her mother Wendy Cromar Mathers had performed on the List of Pollable Persons Within the Shire of Aberdeen 1696, presented in Volume 1 and Volume 2. This important record is available free of charge at…
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Peter Cromar 1690: parallel universes
I’ve completed the chronicle of our study abroad trip to Scotland, a journey that gave me the opportunity to see the Kirkton of Aboyne burial ground and close the circle for my family by burying a lock of my father’s hair at the head of slab stone for our progenitor, Peter Cromar. A lock of…
