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Cromars in the Scottish Postal Directories
“Improvements” changing livelihoods In our exploration of the Jacobite period and its aftermath, we’ve run across many historical descriptions of life in rural Scotland and the nature of farm life. Many sources describe the hardships of subsistence agriculture, which as recounted are hard enough without any other encumbrances. But imagine that life overlaid with an…
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Jannet, Margaret, and Isobel untangle the post-Jacobite Roberts
In our post Jannet Dun or Janet Dunn or Janet Dune, c. 1720-1770?, we discovered previously unknown sources that provide potential new insights as to the makeup of the Cromar’s family and origins, and I promised a post that would revisit the thorny problem of the many Roberts that we have never conclusively solved. Not…
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Jannet Dun or Janet Dunn or Janet Dune, c. 1720-1770?
Cromars in the Jacobite era By the time Robert Cromar and Jannet Dun had settled down and started raising a typically large rural Scottish family, the Second Jacobite Rising may have been quelled, but the thirst for a Jacobite revolution had not been quenched, and a third revolt was to culminate in “the Forty-Five” with…
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Janet Bonar, c. 1695-1789?
AUTHOR’S NOTE: New information and research has invalidated conclusions about Janet’s origins detailed in the following post. You may read about this development at Bonars in the 1696 Poll Book: a deeper understanding of Janet’s origins? Because this journal is about the real-time process of researching and developing a family history hypothesis, and not the hypothesis itself, I have…
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The Janets, Dun and Bonar: on wives of the Jacobite period and gender bias in genealogy
I’ve mentioned how the family historian Martin Robb has inspired this journal. He and I have corresponded about the possible association we may have as cousins-X-times-removed through my patrilineal great-grandmother Christiana Berry Robb, and I can only hope my writing is a fraction as insightful as his in my investigations in future posts. Using family…
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Happy Birthday, Dad!
This blog has been about my patrilineal ancestry, but I haven’t written much about my grandfather or father. Perhaps because I know them firsthand, and all the other people I’ve written about have been almost like fictional characters I’ve had to develop a world and backstory for. I don’t know if I’ve done good research…
