Tracing Kerr ancestors back to Scotland from Nova Scotia

[Elwyn Soutter]

Can’t help with your research but if your family came from Stoer, you might enjoy this quite well known and poignant fiddle tune “Leaving Stoer” by Duncan Chisholm.  Presumably inspired by the many families that left that area over the years for places like Nova Scotia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYOyqHp5dsM

[Forfarian]

I find familysearch is much better at finding variations of names than Scotlandspeople.

You have to use wildcards on Scotland's People to pick up all the variations.

In FS you get variations if someone, somewhere, has flagged them as known variations and instructed the program to return them together, or if they are a Soundex match or something like that. But if no-one has told the program that a certain weird-looking name is a spelling variant of another, it won't necessarily find it.

FamilySearch does tend to return too many variations, some of them implausible. However it's the omissions that I would worry about. For example, for a long time it would not return M*c xxxx (with a space) if you searched for M*cxxxx. 

Also, FS has quite good coverage of the Old Parish Registers in the northern parts of Scotland, but not the southern parts. And some registers are simply missing, for example they forgot to index the baptisms in the parish of Duffus between 1820 and 1854. In other cases they indexed all the male baptisms but not the female ones, or vice versa.

And sometimes it produces very odd results, like missing a baptism or birth if you put in the mother's surname or the child's middle name, but finding it if you take those bits of information out of your search parameters, even though the spelling is identical and it is in the indexed listing.

So although FS may find some (even many) name variations, it can't be relied on to contain all the available information, or to find everything that it contains when you search it. It's an extremely useful search aid, but it's not 100% reliable.

(And I won't start about the 'submitted' listings on FS, some of which are pure fantasy.)

[wivenhoe]

The Will of Alexander KERR, died 1845, is written in 1832, at which time wife Hannah and her children Alexander and Hannah, are alive. The Will accounts for the possible death/remarriage of Hannah, which event will see son Alexander as inheritor. Alexander must be an adult. If son Alexander was a minor at 1832, you might expect to see the Will continue to account for the estate in the event of the death of mother Hannah...and a juvenile Alexander who is too young to manage property.

What happened in 1832 to cause Alexander KERR, died 1845, to write a Will?.

[McJenn]

Maybe a silly question, but have you checked using variant spellings, for example Ker, Carr, Keir and so on?

Well I thought I had been pretty thorough in the search but I missed this Cathel with a father Alexander in Sutherland so I may may need to review the possibilities again!

[McJenn]

In fact the baptism of one of the younger children, Alexander, is written as Alexander Ker.
He was baptised 28th May 1824 at Digby, father Alexander, mother Hannah. No wife's surname. Interestingly it says 'Scotland' and 'Digby' in the entry. I wonder why. It also states he was a yeoman.
These Digby registers on familysearch seem to be books of typed transcriptions. Do you know if there are actual hand written registers McJenn?
I had a look through several pages, but couldn't see a baptism for the daughter Hannah, or the burial of a previous wife of Alexander senior.
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I have only seen the typed version of Digby records. I have also wondered about that 'Scotland and Digby' note. I assumed it meant Alexander was from Scotland, and his younger second wife Hannah was born in Digby. Most of the other records on the page show only Digby though and I'm sure a number of those familly names are Scottish immigrants as well. I also had no luck finding the daughter Hannahs' birth nor Alexander Sr burial. I looked for the latter for quite some time.

[/quote]
Yes, sometimes children can be quite old by the time they were baptised. I have one family in Scotland who baptised 5 children on the same day. I think because there had been a new church of their denomination built near to them, whereas before they would have had to go a long way to get to a church.
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Good to know!!

[McJenn]

ED is short for Eodem Die, which is Latin for 'On the same day'. The date on the first baptism that day is 10 December.

All of this is super helpful thanks. Interesting all of the mothers on that same day are named Christian and two are Kerrs.

[McJenn]

Cathel Kerr seems to have been quite a common name in that area.

There are just 18 baptisms of Cathels in the whole of Scotland in the OPRs, all but two in Assynt. Of these sixteen baptisms of Cathels in Assynt before 1855, ten are Cathel Kerr and four more are the sons of women whose surname was Kerr.

There are 14 deaths of Cathel Kerr in Sutherland the statutory deaths index between 1855 and the present day, of whom six died in Stoer (not including the son of Christian McLellan, who did not die in Scotland after 1855).

This is brilliant - thank you so much for this thorough analysis! I've often thought the name Castle was actually something the Canadians couldn't properly pronounce and this could be it. How fascinating to see this repeated use of a unique name.

Now I have Alexander Kerr in Argyll (Kidalton) with children named Catherine and Margaret, and I have Alexander Kerr in Assynt with a child named Cathel. But no complete family with all three and a John.

It's too bad the Assynt register only starts in 1798. And I wish I could confirm Cathal's age at baptism so I could rule him out based on an 1815 marriage.

Thanks for your help!!!

[McJenn]

The Will of Alexander KERR, died 1845, is written in 1832, at which time wife Hannah and her children Alexander and Hannah, are alive. The Will accounts for the possible death/remarriage of Hannah, which event will see son Alexander as inheritor. Alexander must be an adult. If son Alexander was a minor at 1832, you might expect to see the Will continue to account for the estate in the event of the death of mother Hannah...and a juvenile Alexander who is too young to manage property.

What happened in 1832 to cause Alexander KERR, died 1845, to write a Will?.

That makes sense. But if I have the correct people accounted for, the son Alexander was born to Alexander and Hannah in 1824, so only eight.

[Forfarian]

I am still worried that almost all the recorded Cathel Kerrs were from Assynt in Sutherland, but your Castle was said to be from Argyll.

I can't imagine anyone confusing Sutherland with Argyll, because Ross and Cromarty and Inverness-shire lie between them.

(The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders regiment of the army was founded much later, in 1881, so that doesn't come into it.)