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Peter Cromar 1690 descendancy study is complete!
Six months Six months to the day after I received Ron Cromar’s notes from Paul Smillie, I finalized the descendancy study for our progenitor Peter Cromar. If you wish to cut right to the chase and see the results, you’ll notice a new link in the menu above: Database. As of this writing, the compilation…
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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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Peter Cromar — or MacDonald of Glencoe?
A divided nation At this moment of turbulence in 2021, we Americans think of ourselves as a divided nation. For us, divisive tendencies date back to debates about slavery that animated fateful compromises in our founding documents two and a quarter centuries ago. But frankly, we are absolute amateurs at this: we’ve got nothing on…
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Kirkton of Aboyne burial ground: a Rosetta Stone for Cromar mysteries
Author’s Note: New research has clarified conclusions detailed in this post, in particular the location of Peter Cromar’s memorial on the map. Please visit the following related posts for the full story: Because this journal is about the real-time process of researching and developing a family history hypothesis, and not the hypothesis itself, I have decided to keep…
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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…