Welcome!

This website is a collection of items about several intertwined families of Perthshire, Scotland. The internet is a perfect location for such a study - accessible to far-flung cousins and easy to update with newly discovered material.  You can contribute by contacting me with stories, photos, documents, or anything that applies to these folks. As well, please let me know of errors or typos on these pages.

 

Who's included?

At the moment, descendants of John Kinross & Helen Dawson, of James Graham & Agnes Finlayson, and of William Reid & Lilias Sharp, all of whom were tenant farmers in Dunblane parish, Perthshire. There are no details about living people on this site but names may appear as a child in the family section of their parents or on a chart. 

My ancestors are marked with a green tree icon by their names.

Those who left Scotland are denoted with the flag of their new country, e.g. Canada  .

Finding a person on the site

Navigate via the surname index, the charts, or the search tab, all accessible from the top menu.

There is an individual page for each person for whom I have a reasonable amount of information, which is arranged as follows:

  • Name and birth/death dates
  • Parents' names
  • Person's relationship, if any, to John Kinross (born circa 1750), James Graham (1694), +/or William Reid (c1723)
  • "Extended Family" button which opens up a diagram of the subject's siblings, children, parents, grandparents, and great grandparents
  • Links to charts on which they appear
  • Family section, listing spouse(s) and known children
  • The main section - a chronology of life events
  • Source citations
  • A link to contact me with information, photos, corrections, or just to let me know you are interested! 

 

Other areas to Explore

From the top menu you can also connect to

  • Surname Index - which lists everyone who has their own information page
  • Charts - which illustrate ancestries and descendancies of key people
  • Calendars - just for fun...birthdays, marriages, and death dates of everyone on this site
  • Images - thumbnails linking to larger images and individual's pages
  • What's New? - major additions and changes to the site
  • Search - this site by name or place

 

Dates & Places & Names

The most important consideration in constructing family trees is to confirm the links from generation to generation, e.g. is the John Kinross who married in this parish the same John Kinross who was a child in this other location? By gathering and evaluating a wide variety of evidence, I am reasonably confident that the links in our tree are correct.

A note about spelling - Spelling variations occurred at the whim of the recorder and are inconsequential. A name may even be spelled different ways within one document. For instance, Kinross may be Kinros or Kynros, Graham and Graeme are interchangeable, Isabel could be Isobel or Isabella, Jean is synonymous with Jane, and so on. Published indexes often introduce strange spellings due to difficulty interpreting handwriting. Notes for a given document will indicate if the name was recorded differently than expected.

Women are known by their birth surname throughout their life, as is common in Scotland and according to genealogical convention. Names on this site are as recorded in the particular source.

Traditional Scottish naming practices are interesting and you will see that some of our families followed the tradition. It also explains why there is so much duplication of John, James, William, Mary, Elizabeth, etc.

  • First son named after father's father
  • Second son named after mother's father
  • Third son named after father
  • First daughter named after mother's mother
  • Second daughter named after father's mother
  • Third daughter named after mother

A note about dates - Pinning down precise birth and death dates is impossible in many cases. Before civil registration began (Scotland 1855, England 1837), parish records are the principal source for birth information. Often the actual birthdate is not recorded, only the baptism date. Similarly, there are burial dates but not death dates. When a person's precise birth or baptism date is unknown but can be approximated from census or other records, it is given as a circa date, which is plus or minus a year or two.

Marriages - Dates prior to 1855 are often the date that banns were recorded rather than the date of the marriage. Sometimes there were double records, since banns were called in both the bride's and groom's parishes.

Although 'written in stone', gravestone dates may be inaccurate. Monuments were often erected long after the fact in memory of the deceased who might not even be buried there.

The Dunblane parish registers are a challenge for the researcher!  There are gaps, entries wildly out of order, and the baptisms seldom include the mother's name.

Census records - images of the pages have been viewed for the Canadian and English records. Some of the records from Scotland are from actual images and others from indexes; the source footnotes will clarify which. Note that the FreeCen indexes are more accurate transcriptions than those from Ancestry. Spellings, ages, birthplaces and other data in a census are frequently "incorrect". My notes retain the information as it was written by the enumerator, in most cases dispensing with the usual [sic] notation.

 

Odds & ends

Anything in [square brackets] is an explanatory note that I have added.

The information displayed on these pages will necessarily change as the research continues and this site is updated. Although great care has been taken, I do not guarantee the accuracy of all information on this website.

By checking the citations, you can see where a particular piece of information was found and evaluate how likely it is to be correct. For instance, a date of birth from a birth certificate is more reliable than one from a census or a published book. I have not cited every source that supports a fact; there might be 3 records that say a person was born in Ontario but I typically don't cite them all on this website.

If you are using any of the information presented on this site for your own genealogical research, please remember to cite accordingly.  Something along the lines of "Kinross Genealogy, online, http://genealogy.kolthammer.org/Kinross/, accessed date" would be suitable.

If you would like to hear about updates to this site, please contact me.

 

Acknowledgements

  • Correspondents as noted in the citations and "What's New" section
  • The developers and supportive user community of The Master Genealogist and Second Site, programs which were used to produce this site.