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A deeper Cromar dive: the path from John to Peter
The last few posts have been informed by a thoroughly researched exploration of the Scottish upbringing of my paternal paternal great-grandparents, Theodore James Cromar and Christiana Berry Robb, their lives together in the New World, and the ironic tragedy that awaited with the onset of the Great Depression. Were I to treat every generation as…
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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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Did the Cromars and Georges almost kill Tomnaverie Stone Circle?
Castles and circles I’ve mentioned the Tomnaverie Stone Circle a couple of time in prior posts. I never heard of this amazing site until a few years ago, when I was hosting a study-abroad program through the school where I teach digital media. We were taking a day trip away from Dundee (where we collaborate…
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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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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
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…
