I'm pleased to say that this website will now be home to a series of notes I've been keeping on Scottish immigrants to the new world who were probably or definitely of royal descent.  You can find these underneath the "Scottish Immigrants" tab at the top of the screen.  Eventually this will include a separate page containing notes for each immigrant, but at the moment only a few of these are live.  I hope to gradually add more over the coming months.

Please do let me know if this material is useful and, particularly, if there's an immigrant or immigrants on the index page whose details you'd like me to load sooner rather than later.  I'm happy to accommodate individuals' research interests and am also curious to see which immigrants attract the most attention.

In due course I also hope to say something on this blog about what it might mean that so many immigrants to the new world descended from a single medieval royal family and how that should encourage us to rethink some of the concepts underlying the genealogical fascination with "gateway ancestors" and "royal descents".


Copyright © 2014 Kelsey Jackson Williams

As previous visitors to this website will know, its original purpose was to advertise my services as a professional genealogist.  After a very happy and rewarding year of doing this, I've now had the good fortune to take up an academic post which, sadly, doesn't allow me enough time to also offer my genealogical services professionally.  Rather than take this website down entirely, however, I've converted it into a non-commercial blog and resource collection which I hope will continue to be useful.  I'll still post material relevant to my various genealogical projects as time permits and am, as always, delighted to hear from researchers with similar interests.

It goes without saying that I will be following through all outstanding projects with my clients.

Very best wishes,
Kelsey

Copyright © 2014 Kelsey Jackson Williams

The late medieval and early modern Scottish gentry were overwhelmingly endogamous, marrying within already well-established networks of kinship, friendship, and patronage, usually within their home county and almost always within Scotland itself.[1]  In that respect, John Erskine of Dun in Angus (1509-1590) was unusual in more ways than one.  The reformer, politician, and landowner had first married, when still very young, Elizabeth Lindsay, a daughter of the eighth Earl of Crawford.[2]  Not long after she died in 1538, however, he married, “amid court festivities in Linlithgow”, a French noblewoman newly arrived in the train of Mary of Guise, wife of James V.[3]  This was Barbara de Berle, Dun’s wife for the next thirty-odd years and the mother of six of his children.  She is well attested in a variety of contemporary records, eventually died on 15 November 1572 in Montrose, and was buried at her husband’s ancestral home of Dun.[4]

If Barbara’s activity as the wife of a leading figure in the sixteenth-century Scottish political and theological scene is well-attested, her French origins are not.  The only near-contemporary source for her parentage comes from a manuscript entitled “The Barons, Knights, and Earls of Panmore (by Name Maule) their Genealogy, Marriages, Succession &c. most from Mr. Robert Maule a Son of the House”, which appears within the genealogical manuscripts of the antiquary George Martine (1635-1712), better known for his 1683 account of St. Andrews.[5]  Robert Maule’s original manuscript was written no earlier than the mid-seventeenth century on internal evidence and Martine’s work can probably be dated to no earlier than the 1690s, poor evidence at best, but the only account available.[6]  According to Maule and/or Martine, Barbara was “a French Woman of Picardie in France Daughter to the Lord Camnecourt who came to Scotland with Queen Mary of Lorrain the Regent”.[7]

This account was repeated by Violet Jacob (1863-1946), a distant descendant of Dun, in The Lairds of Dun (1931), without further comment, but Jacob also provided the key which would eventually unlock the problem of Barbara’s ancestry.[8]  A 1552 charter, now in the British Library, contains the seals of both Dun and his wife Barbara and a description was provided by Jacob in an appendix to her work in which she identified Barbara’s seal as consisting of a shield bearing impaled arms, on the dexter side a saltire between four lions contourné and on the sinister on a pale a cross crosslet fitchée.  It also bore a legend “S. Barbara de Barll”.[9]  The sinister half of Barbara’s seal is well-attested as the arms of the Erskines of Dun, but the dexter half provides a crucial clue as to her ancestry.[10]

Armed with this sigillographic evidence, it proved short work to locate the family of Berle, seigneurs de Guignicourt, in Chesnaye-Desbois and Badier’s not always reliable but reasonably comprehensive Dictionnaire de la noblesse; their arms: Azure, a saltire or, between four lions of the same, armed and tongued gules.[11]  The similarities of surname, estate, and arms make it next to certain that this was Barbara’s family.  What generation she belonged to is less clear; perhaps she was the daughter of Enard de Berle, Seigneur de Guignicourt, who married before 1499 to Jacqueline de Savigny?  Regardless, it should now be possible to begin exploring the French ancestry of a remarkable but forgotten sixteenth-century Scottish woman.


[1] There are, of course, exceptions.  One of the better known is the Englishwoman Elizabeth Barley, a maid of honour to Margaret, the English wife of James IV, who married (1) Alexander Elphinstone, 1st Lord Elphinstone, and (2) John Forbes, 6th Lord Forbes (see Sir James Balfour Paul, ed., Scots Peerage, 9 vols. [Edinburgh, 1904-1914], iii. 530-531, iv. 54-55).  The Scots Peerage was unaware of her parentage, but it can be established from an eighteenth-century MS pedigree printed in Sir Montague Barlow, Barlow Family Records (London and Derby, 1932), 46.  http://barlowgenealogy.com/england/SirMontague/BFR-CH6B.pdf
[2] Scots Peerage, iii. 27.
[3] ODNB, sub John Erskine and Walter Macfarlane, Genealogical Collections, 2 vols., ed. James Toshach Clark (Edinburgh, 1900), ii. 153.
[4] “The Obitis of the Lairdis and Ladeis of Dwne”, in Miscellany of the Spalding Club, Volume Fourth (Aberdeen, 1849), lxxvii.  For a discussion of the rich archival evidence illuminating Dun’s two marriages see W. C. J., “Gamnecourt in Picardy: Barbara de Bierle”, Notes and Queries, 2nd series, 11 (1910): 512-513.
[5] It is published in Macfarlane, Genealogical Collections, ii. 125-156.
[6] Based on its reference to the many miscarriages of Margaret Hamilton, wife of James Maule, 4th Earl of Panmure, whose marriage contract is dated 5 February 1687 (Scots Peerage, vii. 26; Macfarlane, Genealogical Collections, ii. 156.
[7] Macfarlane, Genealogical Collections, ii. 153.
[8] Violet Jacob, The Lairds of Dun (London, 1931), 66.
[9] Jacob, Lairds of Dun, 299.
[10] For other contemporary examples of the family of Dun using these arms see William Rae MacDonald, Scottish Armorial Seals (Edinburgh, 1904), 109.
[11] François-Alexandre Aubert de la Chesnaye-Desbois and Jacques Badier, Dictionnaire de la noblesse . . ., 3rd ed. (Paris, 1863-1877), ii. col. 958.

Copyright © 2014 Kelsey Jackson Williams

The latest post at Dr. Mark Jardine's excellent Book of Martyrs highlights the importance of reading errata lists and always remaining aware of the fallibility of type-setters, early modern or otherwise.  In the present instance closer examination of an errata list revealed mistakes in a printed text which subsequently found their way into monumental inscriptions, leading to errors of fact quite literally graven in stone; a reminder that even the most enduring of the genealogist's sources is not above suspicion.

Copyright © 2014 Kelsey Jackson Williams 

Open access -- unrestricted online access to current published research -- is one of the central hot topics in academia today.  The debates surrounding it seem to have largely left genealogists untouched, but it has important ramifications for us, both as users of academic journals and as authors ourselves.  In a future post I hope to discuss at more length what this might entail, but at present I'm pleased to say that the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy has very kindly allowed me to publish an open access version of my article 'A Genealogy of the Grand Komnenoi of Trebizond' (Foundations 2.3 [2006]: 171-189).  A PDF of the article can be accessed on my academia.edu page.  Enjoy!

Copyright © 2014 Kelsey Jackson Williams

Sir William Fraser (1816-1898) was one of the most prolific genealogists and archival scholars in Victorian Scotland.  In a subsequent post I hope to discuss his methods, his writings, and the value of his work for modern genealogists, but I realised that before I could attempt that it would be necessary to compile a bibliography of his publications.  This is the result and is, I believe, complete, although Fraser’s habit of publishing privately and in very small print runs (rarely over a hundred) makes it entirely possible that I’ve missed one or two items.  Where digitised copies are known, I’ve included links, and where they are not I’ve indicated the shelfmarks of the copies in the National Library of Scotland.

Additions or corrections to this bibliography would be welcomed.

 
Chronological Bibliography

 

The Stirlings of Keir and Their Family Papers.  Edinburgh: Privately Printed, 1858.

Memorials of the Montgomeries, Earls of Eglinton, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1859.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

Memoirs of the Maxwells of Pollok, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1863.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

Inventories of the Muniments of the Families of Maxwell, Herries and Nithsdale in the Charter-Room at Terregles.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1865.  NLS ABS.8.84.9

The Pollok-Maxwell Baronetcy: Statement of the Right of William Stirling of Keir, and now of Pollok, to the Baronetcy held by his Maternal Uncle the late Sir John Maxwell of Pollok.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1866.

History of the Carnegies, Earls of Southesk, and of Their Kindred, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1867.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

Memorial of the Right of Walter Coningsby Erskine, Earl of Kellie . . . to the Titles, Honours and Dignities of Earl of Mar and Lord Garioch in the Peerage of Scotland.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1867.  NLS Newb.4441

The Red Book of Grandtully, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1868.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

The Chiefs of Colquhoun and Their Country, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1869.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

Memorial as to the Ruthven Peerage.  n.p.: n.p., 1870.  NLS 6.1152(34)

Registrum Monasterii S. Marie de Cambuskenneth, A.D. 1147-1535.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1872.

The Book of Carlaverock: Memoirs of the Maxwells, Earls of Nithsdale, Lords Maxwell & Herries, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1873.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

Cartulary of Colquhoun of Colquhoun and Luss.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1873.  “Limited ed. of 20 copies”.  NLS ABS.4.86.6

The Lennox, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1874.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

Cartulary of Pollok-Maxwell.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1875.

The Earls of Cromartie: Their Kindred, Country, and Correspondence, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1876.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

The Scotts of Buccleuch, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1878.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

The Red Book of Menteith, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1880.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

The Chiefs of Grant, 3 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1883.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2  Vol. 3

The Douglas Book, 4 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1885.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2  Vol. 3  Vol. 4

Memorials of the Family of Wemyss of Wemyss, 3 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1888.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2  Vol. 3

Memorials of the Earls of Haddington, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1889.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

The Melvilles, Earls of Melville, and the Leslies, Earls of Leven, 3 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1890.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2  Vol. 3

The Sutherland Book, 3 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1892.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2  Vol. 3

The Annandale Family Book of the Johnstones, Earls and Marquises of Annandale, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1894.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

The Elphinstone Family Book of the Lords Elphinstone, Balmerino, and Coupar, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1897.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

Facsimiles of Scottish Charters and Letters, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1903.  NLS X.234.a.  

Papers from the Collection of Sir William Fraser, ed. J. R. N. MacPhail.  Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1924.


Copyright © 2014 Kelsey Jackson Williams

Few works of reference are more ubiquitous than the genealogical dictionaries published under the collective name of “Burke’s”.  They occupy honourable positions in the open-shelf reference collections of dozens of major research libraries, they are cited with remarkable frequency in many other reference works (not least the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), and in the pre-digital era they were perhaps the single most widely available resource outside of Britain for the study of British genealogy.  Despite that, the history underlying the Burkean publishing empire has been largely – although not entirely – neglected.  In this post I’ll briefly outline some of that history and the accompanying criticisms of the genealogical scholarship practised by Burke and his successors, ending by suggesting what we, as responsible modern genealogists, can take away from these problematic works.

The saga began in 1826 when John Burke (1786-1848), an Anglo-Irish poet and journalist, published A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage of the United Kingdom.

Burke’s ostensible reason for publication was what he described as “the absolute want of any book of reference, appertaining to those elevated ranks, the Peerage and Baronetage of the United Kingdom, in which the slightest confidence, as an authority [sic], could be reposed”.[1]  Given the existence of similar works by Debrett, Collins, Douglas, and others, which, although open to criticism by modern standards, represented good genealogical practice at the time, his claim is questionable at best, but the reading public of Regency and Victorian England seems not to have minded; the work was a success and had reached four editions by 1833.  These were rapidly followed by an Extinct, Dormant, and Abeyant Peerage (1831), A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland (1833-1835, later rebranded as Burke’s Landed Gentry), an Extinct and Dormant Baronetage (1838), and a General Armory (1842), as well as more ephemeral publications such as The Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Females, Including Beauties of the Courts of George IV and William IV (1833).

By the 1840s the Burke brand had been largely taken over by Burke’s son, (John) Bernard Burke (1814-1892).  Trained as a barrister, the younger Burke was appointed Ulster King of Arms in 1853 – presumably due to the rising prestige of his family’s publications – and oversaw the Peerage become an annual publication in 1847, the Landed Gentry appear in five editions from 1849 to 1892, and the issue of updated versions of most of his father’s other works.  He also catered to the Victorian taste for romantic aristocracy with a variety of more anecdotal volumes – Vicissitudes of Families, Anecdotes of the Aristocracy, etc. – and made an early gesture towards what would become a lucrative field later in the century with his 1858 Royal Descents and Pedigrees of Founders’ Kin.[2]  At the end of his life he expanded his range of publications even further, cashing in on the hey-day of empire with a two-volume Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Colonial Gentry (1891).

It was precisely its successful homogeneity and seemingly relentless publication of genealogical data that led to increasing criticism of the Burke brand in the later nineteenth century.  The first blow came from Edinburgh in the form of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Popular Genealogists or the Art of Pedigree-Making (1865).  Its author, the Scottish economic historian, peerage lawyer, and eventual Lyon King of Arms, George Burnett (1822-1890), poured withering scorn on the “easy credulity”, “poorly executed fabrication[s]”, and “clumsy and ignorant attempt[s]” of the Burkes’ scholarship.[3]  Most tellingly, he railed against the false legitimacy given to bad genealogy by Burke’s own office as Ulster King of Arms:

Statements which would never otherwise have obtained a moment’s credit, have been allowed to go forth with the imprimatur of the chief herald of Ireland, on the strength of which they are relied on by a large section of the public . . . [y]ear by year new fictions, belonging not to respectable legend, but to vulgar imposture, are obtaining general acceptance on their authority; it is therefore high time that the public should be disabused of their faith in these books.[4]

To some extent this was simply the irritation of erudition when faced with popular scholarship, but Burnett had nonetheless hit on a fundamental and unsettling truth, one which the first John Burke had in part anticipated: the Burke publications did fill a gap in the literature, even if only by virtue of their ubiquity, and as far as the public was concerned bad genealogy was better than no genealogy at all.  Even as early as 1865 the entire shape of British genealogical studies was being fundamentally altered by the Burke family and their “dictionaries”.

Burnett had sounded a note of caution, but the scholars who followed began to comprehensively expose a range of errors across the Burke series, a tradition which reached its culmination in the work of the historian John Horace Round (1854-1928).  A Balliol man and pupil of William Stubbs, Round had devoted himself to the study of medieval English government and genealogy with singular focus and dedication.[5]  In 1893 he published a joint review of Burke’s Peerage (in this case the 1893 edition) and the first edition of George E. Cokayne’s now famous Complete Peerage (1887-1892).[6]  After thoroughly grilling his colleague Cokayne (and finding him to be mostly a good thing), Round turned to Burke in deceptively mild tones:

Of ‘Burke’s Peerage’ we desire to speak with all fairness.  It has long been the fashion to pour contempt on what a well-known genealogist has styled ‘that gorgeous repertory of genealogical mythology,’ and it cannot be denied that it was fully justified by the absurd fables which the Burke family . . . have recklessly repeated in their productions.  But, in justice, it is right to add that these fables were, at the worst, repeated rather than invented, and that slowly but steadily, under the pressure of ridicule and competition, they are being weeded out.[7]

Round, despite his famous irascibility, wrote in the patronising tone of a conqueror reorganising the government of a defeated province.  Although correcting, often sharply, numerous individual errors in the 1893 volume of the Peerage, his overall conviction seems to have been that with sufficient tongue-lashing the Burke brand could be forced to improve and that “what may be fairly described as our standard work upon the Peerage” could yet be saved for scholarly genealogy.[8]

Round’s review may, of course, be contrasted with his more trenchant exposés of Burkean errors in numerous articles and volumes of essays, but it nonetheless represented a turning point.  After the beginning of the twentieth century the Burke Empire, flourishing as ever, found itself subject to comparatively less scrutiny than it had in the Victorian era.  Under the guidance of Sir Henry Farnham Burke (1859-1930) and Ashworth Peter Burke (1864-1919), grandsons of the founder, it continued to prosper and 1939 even saw a belated but substantial recognition of its American audience with the publication of an American supplement to that year’s Landed Gentry.[9]

The problem was that Round, ultimately, had been too kind.  The most egregious frauds and forgeries had gradually been winnowed from the various Burke publications over the course of the nineteenth century, but as standards of genealogical scholarship became ever more exacting, Burke’s works remained dinosaurs in their very form, essentially incapable of transmitting scholarship of a high standard.

Proof of this can be seen by examining the typical early twentieth-century Burkean style, as exemplified in the example above.  Now far wordier than the relatively terse prose of the first generation of publications, the format nonetheless forbids the systematic citation of sources, let alone the careful discussion and evaluation of conflicting evidence.  We are told for example that “Conchobhar nag Cearbhach O’Kelly of Gallagh . . . appears to have been one of the sub-chiefs of Hy-Many, and was living 1585”.  Burke’s “Hy-Many” is Uí Maine, one of the Irish kingdoms located within Connacht, but we remain ignorant of the reasoning behind the publication’s claim: why does Conchobhar “appear” to have been a sub-chief?  On what inference is this based?  Is it related to the document which, we may assume, underlies the claim that he was living in 1585?  The very format which had become essential to the publication of the annual Peerages and periodic other works makes it impossible to answer these questions and thus impossible to produce or replicate good scholarly practice.

These flaws have led many scholars to jettison Burke entirely, branding – not entirely unfairly – the whole endeavour as second-rate, bad genealogy which has done far more harm than good.  While I sympathise with that position, I cannot agree.  As error-ridden and frustrating as the Burke publications are, they nonetheless represent an unparalleled collection of genealogical data and one of the principal reasons why the outlines of British genealogy are comparatively so much better known than those of other European countries.  We may deride the Burkes as clumsy amateurs, we may resent the slapdash nature of what should be a meticulous and thoughtful form of scholarship, but ultimately we would be throwing the baby out with the bath water if we failed to turn to their publications as a first port of call in establishing the genealogy of a British middle- or upper-class family.  Particularly in the case of individuals who lived after 1750, Burke publications can offer an often game-changing snapshot of their family connections which, if not always correct, still offers dozens of points of potential departure for the scholarly genealogist.

After a chequered history during the latter part of the twentieth century, the seemingly unstoppable Peerage has been published again in 2003, complemented by a Landed Gentry of Scotland (2001), and an increasing number of other new and reissued volumes.[10]  It is the older generations of Burke products, however, that remain paramount in influence across the globe, the almost innumerable volumes of Peerages, Landed Gentries, General Armories, and others which were issued between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries.  It is to be regretted that this pillar of genealogical publishing is not, and never can be, what we might want: a truly reliable dictionary of British genealogy.  But the enduring power of the Burke brand and its remarkable legacy is such that, much as we may find to criticise within its covers, it remains one of the largest and most valuable collections of genealogical data ever assembled.


[1] John Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage of the United Kingdom (London, 1826), sig. Ar.
[2] For more on “royal descents” as a phenomenon in nineteenth- and twentieth-century genealogy see my previous blog post on the subject.
[3] George Burnett, Popular Genealogists or the Art of Pedigree-Making (Edinburgh, 1865), 49-50, 89.
[4] Burnett, Popular Genealogists, 89-90.
[5] See the biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.n.
[6] John Horace Round, Review of A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage and Complete Peerage . . . extant, extinct, or dormant, Quarterly Review  177 (October 1893): 386-415.
[7] Round, 397.
[8] Round, 415.
[9] Subsequently republished by the Genealogical Publishing Company as Burke’s American Families with British Ancestry (Baltimore, 1996).
[10] http://www.burkespeerage.com/bookcase.php


Copyright © 2014 Kelsey Jackson Williams

In my last post I discussed using Personalbuchs, death records, and university albums to round out our knowledge of the Hirschhausen family.  In the process we discovered that Emmy von Lemm, the mother of the family, was born in the German settlement of Katharinenfeld, now Bolnisi, in Georgia.  Lacking access to any Lutheran parish registers from Katharinenfeld, have we reached a dead end or can we still learn something about her ancestry?

We can start by recalling what we already know.  According to her marriage record she was the daughter of Pastor Diaconus Joseph Lemm, who, we may suppose, was quite probably the husband of the pastor’s wife Marie von Lemm who stood godmother to Emmy’s daughter Bertha (see the previous posts in this series).  We can also return to a seemingly unimportant piece of information in the Personalbuch entry for her and her husband’s family:

On the left is the entry for her birth, on the right the entry for her confirmation.  She was confirmed in Reval (modern Tallinn) in the spring of 1886, almost six months before she married Richard Hirschhausen in the Ritter- und Domkirche there.  It might seem like the smallest of clues, but the gap is telling: not only was she married in Reval, but she was living there at least half a year before.  Could her family have migrated from rural Georgia to (or back to?) Reval and might there be evidence of them in Reval records?

A quick search of the Personalbuch for the Ritter- und Domkirche in this period rewards our suspicions:

Pastor Diaconus Joseph Lemm, his wife, and children are all present, including Emmy, who turns out to be the eldest.  The birthplaces given for her siblings suggest that Joseph and Marie Lemm left Georgia circa 1874x1877 and were in Reval by 1881.  But what were they doing in Georgia in the first place?  Our first port of call is the Dorpat Album Academicum I discussed previously:

We can supplement this, however, with Lemm’s entry in the Erik Amburger Datenbank, a massive online prosopographical study of foreigners in pre-revolutionary Russia (fortunately for our purposes, Baltic-Germans outside of the Baltic provinces fall within the EAD’s remit).  Lemm, it turns out, is very well documented.  Not only are we presented with a list of printed materials which mention him, we also learn – in addition to the biography provided by the Album Academicum – that he was educated at the exclusive St. Petrischule in St. Petersburg from 1852 to 1858.  From there he studied theology in Dorpat before taking up his post as a Lutheran minister . . . in Katharinenfeld.

From there, it’s the work of a moment to turn to the birth registers for Hapsal in search of Joseph Lemm’s birth record, but what should be a routine search proves to be unexpectedly problematic: the Hapsal birth registers were searched from June 1840 through the end of 1841 but no Joseph Lemm is to be found.  What to do?  One possible avenue of research would be to examine the revision lists for Hapsal during this period, but unfortunately no family of Lemms can be discovered (revision lists and their uses will be returned to in a future post).  Another possibility, however, lies in the very name of the family: Lemm or von Lemm?  Use of the nobiliary particle in Baltic-German culture could mean several things.  It might mean membership in the Ritterschaft of one of the Baltic territories, the aristocratic governing castes who exerted decisive political power in the Baltic from the middle ages to 1918.  But it also might mean that the family in question had been granted nobility by a foreign power but had never been matriculated into a Ritterschaft, been ennobled in Russia as service nobility, or were not noble at all, but were instead members of the urban mercantile patriciates in Reval, Riga, and elsewhere.  A number of published resources of varying levels of detail and reliability cover these various classes of nobility.

The first ports of call when investigating a Baltic-German noble family are the eight volumes of the Genealogisches Handbuch der Baltischen Ritterschaft, divided into subdivisions covering Estland, Livland, Kurland, and Ösel:

Of these, only the sections for Estland and Ösel were completed; work on further volumes covering Livland and Kurland was interrupted by the second world war.    Unfortunately, this means that the Livland and Kurland volumes lack indexes and can be navigated only by tables of contents.  Finding no indication of a von Lemm family in either, we then turn to the indexes in the volumes covering Estland and Ösel.  In the latter we find, not an article on the von Lemms themselves, but two scattered notices, including one relating directly to the family under consideration:

This seems to suggest that the von Lemms were never matriculated in any of the Ritterschafts (unless, of course, they were resident in Livland or Kurland and were amongst the families not covered by the existing volumes).  So we turn to the relevant volume of the ‘Neuer Siebmacher’, a vast roll of armigerous families in the German lands published between 1854 and 1967.  There – under “Nichtimmatrikulirte Adel” – we find . . . absolutely nothing:

Gritzner, however, tends to ignore Russian nobility in the Baltic-German provinces, so it may be that the von Lemms were ennobled by the Russian state in the relatively recent past.  This probably means there will be no published pedigree of the family and we’ll have to make contact with a researcher in St. Petersburg to investigate the relevant archival material.  However, on the off-chance, we check Alfred von Hansen’s Stammtafeln nicht immatrikulierter baltischer Adelsgeschlechter, 1 vol. in 8 parts (Reval, 1932-1939).  Remarkably, we are rewarded and we suddenly find ourselves presented, not only with Joseph von Lemm’s parents, but with a complete pedigree of the family:

To find that von Hansen covered the family one’s looking for is a piece of good luck and an unusual one at that, but it highlights the value of published noble genealogies.  Often reliant upon family archives and church books which have since vanished in the upheavals of the twentieth century, they can be invaluable for bridging links like this one and providing an extensive pedigree upon which to base further research.  Their weakness, of course, is their limited coverage: most families were not noble and for them other sources will have to be used, especially before the standardisation of vital records in 1834.  In my next post I’ll discuss how we can make use of revision lists and pre-1834 parish registers to reconstruct a non-noble Baltic-German family living in rural Estonia (city dwellers present their own special problems and will be discussed in a later post).

Have these essays been useful to you?  Did they help you study a Baltic-German family?  If so do get in touch -- I’d love to hear about it.

Copyright © 2013 Kelsey Jackson Williams

In 1883, a thirty-seven year old newspaperman had a new idea.  Charles Henry Browning was an agent for the New York Herald in Philadelphia and lived with his uncle J. K. Walker, a wholesale druggist, at 1632 Spruce Street.[1]  His youth had been marked by trauma: in 1850, at the age of four, he had lost his father, Robert Lewright Browning, a lieutenant in the American navy, when he was drowned in Trinidad Bay off the coast of California.  The tragedy was re-enacted with eerie precision a decade later when Charles’s brother, also named Robert Lewright, was on the U.S. sloop Levant when it was lost in the Pacific Ocean in 1860.[2]  What the young Browning made of these twin deaths is unknown, but what is known is that twenty years later he struck out into a field far more rarified than journalism: he became a genealogist.

Browning was not just any genealogist.  He specialised in tracing royal descents for the Gilded Age magnates of the American East Coast and in 1883 he published the first fruits of his research, a volume simply entitled Americans of Royal Descent. 

Browning himself was oddly absent from this and subsequent books, tersely warning in a prefatory ‘advertisement’ that:

The compiler of this collection of genealogies of American Families traced to Kings, wishes it distinctly understood that he holds himself responsible for only the accuracy of their transcriptions, as they have been reproduced from recognized authorities; from privately printed family histories, and information supplied in manuscript by the families themselves,

and appearing in a genealogy of his mother’s family simply as “Charles Henry Browning, of Philadelphia, Pa.”  His initial one hundred and twenty copy print-run must have been successful, for a second edition appeared in 1891, this time entitled Americans of Royal Descent: A Collection of Genealogies of American Families Whose Lineage is Traced to the Legitimate Issue of Kings (no bastards here).  In 1898 these were supplemented with The Magna Charta Barons and their American Descendants, whose faux-blackletter title-page still embodies the social and cultural pretensions of fin-de-siècle American society:

Browning is not much remembered now, or, if he is, it’s only to be reviled as the author of the famously inaccurate Welsh Settlement of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1912).  His archives lie, hopefully not mouldering but certainly unread, in the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress.  But he started something that’s still with us today: the intense, unique, and sometimes baffling fascination that American genealogists have for “royal descents”.[3]

After Browning came a host of publications on the same topic.  Frederick Lewis Weis’s Ancestral Roots and Magna Charta Sureties were, in many ways, updated versions of Browning’s two works and went through many editions between the first publication of Ancestral Roots in 1950 and its – so far – final incarnation (edited, after Weis’s death, by Walter Lee Sheppard) in 2004.  Since then Gary Boyd Roberts has produced two editions of a compendium of these descents, The Royal Descents of 500 (later 600) Immigrants to the American Colonies or the United States (1993-2004) and is working on a third, while Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (2004) and Magna Carta Ancestry (2005) continue both the tradition and the topical division begun by Browning in 1883 into the twenty-first century.  The major genealogical journals regularly publish articles on newly discovered descents from royalty for early American immigrants and regular readers of soc.genealogy.medieval will be familiar with the controversy and, at times, acrimony, which can surround discussions of the validity or lack thereof of these pedigrees.

To observe the phenomenon is one thing, to understand it another, and I don’t pretend to do so.  When it began in Browning’s Main Line Philly it seems to have been about aggrandisement, about a class of nouveau riche proving that they had the pedigrees to go with their money and were the match for any old world aristocrats they happened to come across (whether the old world aristocrats cared is another story).  Now, though, in its popularity across social strata in America it seems to be about something else and I wonder if it’s continuation into the modern era might have something to do with another American fixation which Europeans are especially apt to comment on: the determination with which we hang onto immigrant ethnic identities long after we’ve been stirred into the deracinating melting pot of American culture.  I wonder if royal descents, like claims to being Irish, German, or Italian when our parents and grandparents were born in Chicago or New York or Philadelphia, are part of an American attempt to reach back to the European past and make a connection with their increasingly shadowy origins.

What do you think?  I’d love to see comments from Americans who have proven royal descents for themselves.  What motivated you to undertake the – let’s face it – remarkably time-consuming research to study this sort of pedigree?  What about it interests or fascinates you?


[1] 1880 U.S. Census, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, E.D. 127, page 180C, enumerated 5 June by Edward J. Aledo, 118-165, 1632 Spruce Street.
[2] Browning Family Papers, Finding Aid, Library of Congress; Charles H. Browning, Americans of Royal Descent (Philadelphia, 1883), 17.
[3] A parallel publication appeared in England in the same year: the first fascicle of the genealogical entrepreneur Joseph Foster’s The Royal Lineage of Our Noble and Gentle Families (London, 1883).  Neither refers to the other and whether there was, indeed, some reciprocal influence or they simply represent the Zeitgeist of their Age remains unexplained.  We Moderns, however, may at least be entertained to see the royal descent (from Edward III) of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper on page 90 of Foster’s work.


Copyright © 2013 Kelsey Jackson Williams

We tend to think – and with reason – that higher education in the pre-modern world was the domain of the elite.  This is true, but it doesn’t tell the entire story.  A substantial number of students in British universities from before the Reformation until comparatively recently were being educated for careers, not lives of leisure, and an examination of university records can often reveal a surprising amount of information about both upwardly- and downwardly mobile individuals. 

In Scotland, which had a phenomenally high literacy rate of 75% as early as 1750, not to mention twice as many universities as its neighbour to the south, university records are a particularly important resource for tracing any family from tacksmen to peers.  Unfortunately, researchers used to the biographically rich dictionaries of English graduates, the Alumni Oxonienses and Cantabrigienses, will be disappointed.  Some works, such as Anderson’s Fasti of Marischal College or Addison’s Glasgow matriculation albums, contain more or less the level of information found in the English Alumni, but most others are bare lists of names, reflecting the sparer record-keeping practices of many of the Scottish universities; sometimes it was simply impossible for the scholars who compiled these materials to identify which 'James Baillie' or 'Robert Young' a particular entry referred to.

Why bother with such records, then, if identification of individual university graduates is so uncertain?  Perhaps the best reason is the idiosyncratic Scottish use of “Mr” in early modern documents.  Whereas English usage of the period was simply honorific (“Mr” in the seventeenth century and before was an abbreviation for “master” and vaguely implied superior social status but little more), in Scotland the title was reserved for literal masters, men who had graduated M.A. (magister artium) from a university.  If you’re investigating such a person, locating their university record can help pinpoint their date of birth, indicate possible links of association and patronage, and perhaps even provide a clue as to their place of origin.

But how to start?  To indicate some first ports of call and to give a sense of what material is available in print, I’ve compiled a comprehensive bibliography of published university matriculation albums, graduation rolls, fasti, and similar documents, indicating where digital versions exist (similar to the catalogue of burgess rolls I compiled recently).  I’ve also included brief comments on the information they contain and examples of what you can expect to find.

Aberdeen

Peter John Anderson, ed.  Fasti Academiae Mariscallanae Aberdonensis: Selections from the Records of Marischal College and University, MDXCIII-MDCCCLX, 3 vols.  Aberdeen: Printed for the New Spalding Club, 1889-1898.  Vol. 1.  Vol. 2.  Vol. 3.

Anderson’s Fasti are some of the best examples of their kind.  A typical example of the material given on late eighteenth-century undergraduates is this, taken from page 377:

Peter John Anderson, ed.  Officers and Graduates of University & King’s College, Aberdeen, MVD-MDCCCLX.  Aberdeen: Printed for the New Spalding Club, 1893.

By contrast, Anderson’s volume for King’s is sparser in the information it provides – in large part due to the different record-keeping systems of the two universities.  Note in this example (from page 251) that while most of the students are identified only by county of origin, James Trail is specifically stated to be the son of the minister of Dunnet in Caithness:

Edinburgh

A Catalogue of the Graduates in the Faculties of Arts, Divinity, and Law, of the University of Edinburgh, Since its Foundation.  Edinburgh: The Bannatyne Club, 1858.

None of the Edinburgh registers are particularly informative, although the Catalogue does consistently indicate whether a particular graduate was training for the ministry, data which can potentially be of considerable use in identifying them further:

Alphabetical List of Graduates of the University of Edinburgh from 1859 to 1888.  Edinburgh: by James Thin, 1889.

A bare list of names, with very occasional notes as to subsequent profession:

List of the Graduates in Medicine in the University of Edinburgh, from MDCCV to MDCCCLXVI.  Edinburgh: Printed by Neill & Company, 1867.

Students are identified by their country of origin (distinctions being made between English, Scotland, and Ireland) and by the title of their thesis:

Glasgow

W. Innes Addison, ed.  Matriculation Albums of the University of Glasgow from 1728 to 1858.  Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1913.

Addison’s is probably the genealogically richest – not to mention the most entertaining – of any of the university registers, a fairly characteristic example being:

W. Innes Addison, ed.  A Roll of the Graduates of the University of Glasgow from 31st December, 1727 to 31st December, 1897.  Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons, 1898.

While less extensive than Addison’s Matriculation Albums, his Roll of the Graduates still frequently gives later places of residence, occupations, and (occasionally) parentage:

Munimenta Alme Universitatis Glasguensis: Records of the University of Glasgow, from its Foundations till 1727, 4 vols.  Glasgow: The Maitland Club, 1854.  Vol. 1.  Vol. 2.  Vol. 3.  Vol. 4.

The third volume includes a list of graduates from 1578 to 1695 and 1707 to 1727, a list of matriculations from 1590 to 1696, and various other identifying lists of university members.  Information beyond a name and sometimes a nationality is usually non-existent (although note the future antiquary, politician, and composer John Clerk of Pennycuik at the bottom of the page):

University of Glasgow: Graduates to 1913.  

An online database maintained by the university which contains most or all of the information given in the above printed sources.


St. Andrews

James Maitland Anderson, ed.  Early Records of the University of St Andrews: The Graduation Roll, 1413-1579.  Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1926.

James Maitland Anderson, ed.  The Matriculation Roll of the University of St Andrews, 1747-1897.  Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1905.

Earlier entries are merely names, but from the mid-nineteenth century onwards places of residence are also given (Smart’s Biographical Register remains the better genealogical resource, however):

R. N. Smart, ed.  Alphabetical Register of the Students, Graduates and Officials of the University of St Andrews, 1579-1747.  St. Andrews: University of St. Andrews Library, 2012.

R. N. Smart, ed.  Biographical Register of the University of St. Andrews, 1747-1897.  St. Andrews: University of St. Andrews Library, 2004.

An exemplary piece of biographical detective-work, with rich, complete biographies of most students from the period covered.

Thanks to Janet Wolfe for pointing out the online database of Glasgow graduates.

Copyright © 2013 Kelsey Jackson Williams