RootsChat.Com

Hello Sceptical. When you had a great-aunt who kept telling you when a child that you descended from Scottish royalty and you'd better start acting like it, eventually you start looking into it seriously. I haven't yet gotten around to the Plantagenets however a rich cousin did. Right now I've got the issue of documenting that the said ancestor was a son of the then Laird of Barrie, who was in turn a grandson of the 6th Baron Saltoun. Before the bankrupt Laird's estate in Strath Ilsa got sold to one of the MacDuffs and a hot-headed youngster was involved in rebelling against the British crown.

Thanks. I (and others) have been researching this ancestor for decades. We know the date of his marriage, and that he died in Jan 1685, just prior to a Feb probate case. We know that he had at least one son and one daughter, purchased land and served on court cases in his lifetime. My current database on this surname (in it's many misspellings) has over 30,000 names on this subject. Alas, to date we have not been able to correctly document his alleged father, so in a sense, we're slightly stuck. I am now too old and too ill to personally go to England and dig in the PRO at Kew for the information we have from that 1975 document left for us by a (wannabee) genealogist relative, who utterly failed to properly cite her sources. So we must somehow do it all over again, or simply call it a dead-end brick wall.

Meanwhile, some of us can appreciate that our ancestor helped shape the legal system of the United States via his immediate acts after fulfilling his bond servitude a free man. He married and left a document legitimating his natural daughter born while he was a bondservant and unable to marry. He purchased land and became well thought of in the community. The document providing a dower for his daughter set a precedent that women in these future United States could own property in their own name and administer it without oversight of a husband or male relative, long before women in the UK gained that right.