Finding this group a 'clan home'

[AntonP]

   Many years ago I tried to find out to which sub-clan my Stewart ancestors belonged. I approached the Stewarts of Balquhidder website but they felt my Stewart family group did not belong within their clan grouping.
I am hoping that with the advance of digitised information, plus a much greater interest in family trees/history some one on Rootschat might have family from the information given below on their own tree:                                   

Our information is as follows:
Generation 1.*   
* Information collated from birth, marriage and death certificates and census reports.

Robert Stewart.
So far no date of birth can be found but it is thought, based on his marriage in 1722 to Margaret ‘Cowpar’ (also spelt Coupar) to be around 1690 to 1700. He was recorded on his son’s, John, birth certificate in 1727 as a maltman. His other children were Cristiaine (his wife’s mother’s name – born 22.10.1723), Mathew (3.4.1725), Margaret (1729), Janet (1731). Formal birth and death notifications only had to be advised from about 1855 onwards. Until then these notices were optional and when made were recorded in church records. Many such records have been lost so it is difficult to trace a working man’s history back beyond the mid 1700s. In fact to have gone as far back as 1690/1700 is considered good going.

Generation 2

John Stewart was shown to be a soldier on his son’s birth certificate in 1761 and then a merchant on another birth certificate dated 1763 and also on his son’s 1765 birth certificate. At the time of the 1745 rebellion against the English in favour of the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, he would have been 18 and quite likely to have been able to take part in the various Jacobite uprisings or been in the English forces. After the collapse of the uprising he could have been co-opted into English forces which he was serving in up to around 1863. No trace of the marriage of John to Janet McIntosh could be found in the 1977 search of records.

Generation 3.
William Stewart is shown in the birth certificate of his son as a Brewer of Perth. His marriage certificate showed him as a maltman and his wife, Marion (also shown in some records as Mary) Taylor, was the daughter of a Perth fisherman. They married on 8.7.1794. They moved to Auchterader between 1795 (the date their first son was born in Perth and who possibly died in infancy) and the date of birth of their first daughter, Janet, born in 1796 in Auchterader. The first Scottish census of 1841 has no record of either of them. They would both have been 69 or over by that time. Their dates of death according to the ADLHA record of the Register of Mortality 1847-1878, Book 4 for the Parish of Auchterader shows that William died on 17.12.1850 and Marion on 28.3.1854.

My mother (a Stewart) once said in passing that her Stewarts were not Jacobites. Unfortunately at that time I had no interest in family history so did not take it further. However as I know family stories can often be fantasies.

I would be pleased if we could find them a 'clan home'.
Anton
                                               

[antiquesam]

Your request confuses me. What do you mean by a "Clan home"? Having a specific surname doesn't necessarily relate you to a local chieftain. Many people merely took the name of the local landowner when the need for a surname was needed just as others took on the name of their occupation.

[AntonP]

Apologies if my wording has been unclear. I was referring to the possibility of a certain link to a Stewart group or family (for example Stewarts of Appin - which I was earlier told that there seemed to be no link to) or some similar Stewart family group.
I do hope this might clarify what i am searching for.
Anton

[Forfarian]

I notice that you have carefully avoided giving any indication of where your Generations 1 and 2 lived.

Until the introduction of statutory civil registration of births, deaths and marriages on 1 January 1855, records were collected by the church and thus based on the parish where they lived.

If your Stewarts lived in a parish that was part of recognised clan lands, it would be reasonable to suppose that they belonged to that clan or sept.

If not - for example if they had moved into and lived in a large town or growing city - then without knowing their parish of origin you are unlikely to find out which sept of a clan they belonged to.

At the time of the 1745 rebellion against the English

To call it a 'rebellion against the English' is to oversimplify matters significantly. Some clans and septs (and indeed some English families) were aligned with the Hanoverians and others with the Jacobites. You would need to study the history of the Rising to find out which families were on which side in order to be able to eliminate the unlikely ones.

No trace of the marriage of John to Janet McIntosh could be found in the 1977 search of records.

What do you mean by this? What relevance does 1977 have? Things have moved on quite a lot in the 45 years since then in terms of availability of the original records.

See https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=714261.0

[AntonP]

Forfrian.
The information on Gen 1, 2, 3 given above was obtained in the 1970s via physical searches of records by genealogists from Edinburgh who were engaged by a Stewart family member to obtain information on his early family. The last of these searches was 1977, which is the reference to this date.

Sorry, I did not mean to leave out place names. Yes the families seem to be towns people not from the country. I note your statement about then having difficulty of finding which sept of a clan they might have belonged to.

Place information as follows:
Gen 1
Margaret Cowpper note spelling difference) B 26.10.1703 in Perth Co Perth.
Robert + Margaret. Married Perth Co, Perth 4.8.1722.
Birth of son John 1729 in Perth Co, Perth.
No details of Robert Stewart's birth could be found in the physical searches in numerous parishes around Perth.

Gen 2
Marriage of John Stewart + Jane Macintosh Kirkmichael Parish Co Perth. Dec 1756

Anton

[Forfarian]

Ah, I see.

note spelling difference

Please don't ascribe any significance at all to differences in spelling. Spelling was how the person writing it down thought at the time. You often find different records of the same person with multiple spelling variants. You even find the same clerk using different spellings of the same person's name, sometimes even in the same document.

Robert St*art and Ma*g* C*p*r seem to have had quite a large family. See attached screenshot from Scotland's People (showing 2 spellings of Stewart and 4 spellings of Cooper).

[AntonP]

Forfarian
Thank you for your last message and details of offspring. Apologies or not replying sooner.
Anton