Following yesterday’s post on the romantic Stirling of Glorat story, I put together a royal descent (probably the closest one) for the American branch of the Stirlings of Glorat, as follows:
1. James V, King of Scots (d. 1542).
2. (illegitimate by Catherine, daughter of Sir John Carmichael) John Stewart, Commendator of Coldingham, Lord Darnley (d. 1563), [...]
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
From the papers, the fascinating story of the (apparent) heir to the Scottish baronetcy of Stirling of Glorat (William J. Booher, “Tracing Family Tree Turns into a Title Search: Greenwood man has some details to confirm before becoming baronet,” Indianapolis Star, 19 March 2009).
Coat of arms from the frontispiece to Bain (1883). The coat would [...]
I’ve now found confirmation of Captain (later General) William Crosbie’s place in the Anglo-Irish gentry Crosbie family which bore the swords-and-snake crest found on the pistols traditionally identified as Major Pitcairn’s (see my previous post, linked here). I had suggested that he belonged somewhere in the Ardfert Crosbie family found in Burke’s 1866 Dormant, [...]
Hwaet! Unto us this day is born, in the city of Pawtucket, in the state of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations, our fourth child and second son, Simon Lane Taylor.
Like genograms but for soccer moms rather than therapists, those self-satisfied minivan decals have emerged as the latest diagrammatic lexicon for identifying one’s family. [...]
The first spoils of the Revolutionary War are surely the handsome pair of Murdoch pistols long attributed to Major John Pitcairn, who is said to have lost them on April 19 1775 during the harrowing return from Concord to Boston (they were variously said to have been in the baggage train, or on his [...]
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
One of the hidden treasures that has rewarded my browsing in The Ancestor (of which I recently bought a set of all twelve volumes in their original publisher’s bindings), is a handsome set of cuts made after fourteenth-century encaustic floor tiles from Tewkesbury Abbey. See Hal Hall, “Notes on the Tiles at Tewkesbury Abbey,” [...]
It’s the plot of an old romance film mapped onto a common genealogical trajectory: boy meets ancestor, boy loses ancestor. Marshall Kirk used to talk about ‘former ancestors’—people you once believed you were descended from, and of whom you still might be fond. Sometimes they even find a way back into the [...]
