Category: Genealogy

  • More on Thuddie and Teenie: Insights from my Father

    More on Thuddie and Teenie: Insights from my Father

    Official data is the life-blood of genealogy, and while a careful researcher can infer a lot about family dynamics from documentation, it can only get you so far. Genealogists are right not to place stock in anecdotal evidence, but data is sometimes a skeleton that lacks the flesh only family stories can supply. Perhaps official…

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  • Thuddie and Teenie in the New World

    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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  • Christiana Berry Robb 1867-1960

    Christiana Berry Robb 1867-1960

    Lumphanan The Howe of Cromar is a quite distinct oval, but other districts of Mar are less geographically distinguishable. From west to east, these include Braemar, Cromar, Midmar, and “Mar the most easterly portion.” On the heat map of Cromar-Robb habitation in Aberdeenshire, no place is more active than the village of Lumphanan and environs.…

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  • Theodore James Cromar 1868-1930

    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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  • The Backstory

    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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  • Welcome to Cromarbaile!

    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,…

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