Scope and Contents

Comprised of: title deeds to their various estates and other properties in Fife and elsewhere (Ch.12871-12978), burgess tickets (Ch.12979-12984), military commissions (Ch.12985-12993) and other documents (Ch.12994-1296) relating to various members of the family, and a few apparently unrelated documents. An inventory, listing each document individually, is available.

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Ch.5902-5903 and Ch.5905 refer to members of the Pitcairn family of Forthar; the remainder concern transactions between John Mowat and James Fullarton, burgesses in Edinburgh. Ch.5901 is an abstract of the documents.

Scope and Contents Most of these papers consist of titles and estate papers relating to the lands of Carntyne and Shettleston in Glasgow. They are particularly important for the history of the colliery at Westmuir from the death of John Gray of Carntyne in 1796 until that of his grandson, the Rev John Hamilton Gray, in 1867, but there is material from both before, and in particular from after that period. Robert Gray (d.1833) was a resident landowner, and an enthusiastic coalmaster. Though not all the Westmuir...

Scope and Contents

More detailed lists of contents are available on request.

Scope and Contents The charters of the Minto family include titles to all the lands owned by the family in Roxburghshire, Fife, and Angus. The Roxburghshire titles include a few from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but they and the Angus titles are not numerous until the seventeenth century. The earliest Fife titles however go back to the twelfth century, and the series is virtually complete from then until modern times.The lands of Headshaw were acquired by Sir Gilbert Elliot, 1st Baronet,...

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These papers relate mostly to personal and business affairs. An inventory of these charters is available.

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A note on John Richardson's children will be found in MS.3989, folio i.

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Robert Paul, manager of the Commercial Bank of Scotland, married Charlotte, the daughter of John Erskine of Cambus, advocate, in 1814. The connection of the Pauls with the Erskines of Alva, and later with the Erskine Murrays, remained strong, and the antiquarian interests of the Reverend Robert Paul, Free Church minister at Dollar, led him to examine many of the Erskine papers. Some of these remained with the Paul’s and now form part of the collection.

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The George Adam Smith Archive, comprising correspondence and papers, 1859-1949, of the Very Rev Sir George Adam Smith (1856-1942), theologian, Moderator of the United Free Church General Assembly, 1916, and Principal of Aberdeen University, 1910-35; of his wife Lilian, née Buchanan (1866-1949) and her family; and of their family, particularly George Buchanan Smith (d.1915) and Robert Dunlop Smith (d.1917).

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MSS.2884-2888 and several letters in MS.2883 (indicated under that number) formed part of a collection of material relating to Thomas Carlyle, formed, at least in part, by Frederick Martin, a copyist employed by Carlyle, who commenced a biography of Carlyle in the ‘Biographical Magazine’, 1877.

Scope and Contents The main part of the collection comprises the correspondence between Lady Lilian Adam Smith and her eldest daughter, Mary ['Maisie'] Buchanan Drew. These letters contain detailed, diary-like letters relating domestic matters, news and comments on current affairs, and family anecdotes and reflections, between the 1910s and Lady Lilian's death in 1949 and covering both World Wars. The collection also includes a series of Mary Buchanan Drew's journals, with a detailed account of her relocation...

Scope and Contents The collection, in which family correspondence predominates, reflects all aspects of the naval career of Robert Kirk Dickson. He took part in the Battles of the Falkland Islands, 1914, Gallipoli, 1915, and Jutland, 1916. In the Second World War he served as Duty Captain in the Admiralty War Room, 1939-1940, and commanded the fast minelayer, H.M.S. Manxman, 1940-1942, when he took part in a series of offensive minelaying operations in the Channel, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. He was Deputy...

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The papers include correspondence of other members of the family of Haldane of Cloan covering a period of almost a century and a half from the beginning of the 19th century, especially rich for the period 1875-1937.

Scope and Contents The founder of the family was Gilbert Elliot (1651-1718), a younger son of Gavin Elliot of Midlem Mill. Gilbert Elliot was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1688, created a baronet in 1700, and appointed a Lord of Session as Lord Minto in 1705; he acquired the lands of Headshaw in Roxburghshire in 1696, and added Minto to his property in 1703. Sir Gilbert Elliot, 2nd Baronet (1693-1766), likewise had a distinguished legal career, becoming a Lord of Session as Lord Minto in 1726, a...

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Correspondence and papers of the families of Ramsay and Dundas of Ochtertyre in Kincardine-of-Menteith, Perthshire, principally of the latter family.

Scope and Contents The family estates of Cumbernauld and Lenzie in East Dunbartonshire extended into the neighbouring parishes of Monkland in Lanarkshire and Dunipace in Stirlingshire. That of Biggar in Lanarkshire included also some lands in Peeblesshire, where the Flemings were in conflict with the Tweedies of Drumelzier. Members of the family were prominent in public affairs in the 16th and 17th centuries, but the later Earls took little part in them. The male line failed in 1747, and the estates passed to...

Scope and Contents Contains correspondence and papers of John Mackenzie, Advocate and a Principal Clerk of Session, of Cramond and later of Delvine (died 1731), his sons Alexander, Writer to the Signet and a Principal Clerk of Session (died 1737), and John, Writer to the Signet, Deputy-Keeper of the Signet (died 1778), and Alexander's grandson Sir Alexander Muir Mackenzie, 1st Baronet, Writer to the Signet (died 1835); formed a distinguished line of lawyers who were active in the affairs of their day and...

Scope and Contents The collection consists largely of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century correspondence. The chief correspondents are the members of the family most active in public life, and their letters are on the whole more concerned with public than with personal affairs, though there is some discussion of family matters in the seventeenth-century letters. The most important and extensive correspondence is that of the 1st Marquess of Tweeddale, which dates from 1660 to 1697, and covers most of his...

Scope and Contents The collection covers the Admiral the Honourable Sir Alexander Forrester Inglis Cochrane’s service in the Egyptian expedition of 1801, in his command off Ferrol in 1804 and 1805, and as Commander-in-Chief of the Leeward Islands from 1805 to 1814 and of the North American Station in 1814 and 1815; and that of Admiral Sir Thomas John Cochrane chiefly as Governor of Newfoundland from 1825 to 1834, and as second-in-command and, later, Commander-in-Chief of the East India Station from 1842 to...

Scope and Contents The Richards family of Horndean in Hampshire began its connection with America in the early 19th century when John Richards opened a business in Boston, Massachusetts. Although his son, Francis Richards, established a manufacturing business in Gardiner, Maine, the family retained strong European ties. The constant coming and going across the Atlantic gives the collection a very cosmopolitan outlook enhanced by the marriage in 1878 of Francis Gardiner Richards to Anne Ashburner whose family...

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Correspondence and papers, literary manuscripts and journals of Sylvester Douglas, Baron Glenbervie (1744-1823) and of earlier members of the Douglas family, mainly his great-grandfather, Robert Douglas (1625-1716), Bishop of Brechin, 1682-1684, and the last Bishop of Dunblane (1684-1689) in the pre-Revolution episcopal establishment of the Church of Scotland; and his father, John Douglas of Fechil in the parish of Ellon, Aberdeenshire (1714-1762).