Surname Saturday: Haliburton

Haliburton is a Scottish surname which comes from two farms near Greenlaw in Berwickshire - Meikle and Little Haliburton. It is thought that the original name for the area was Burton, from the Norse bur, a storehouse, and dun (pronounced toon), a fort. Then a chapel was built and the area became Holy or Haly Burton.

The earliest recorded bearer of the surname was David de Halyburton who, in 1176, gave the chapel at Halyburton to the Abbey of Kelso. The Haliburtons originally held estates at Merton and Muirhouselaw near Dryburgh. In the 14th century they acquired by marriage the lordship of Dirleton, in East Lothian and, in the 15th century, the lordship of Pitcur in  Angus.

From Pitcur there developed a strong Angus branch of the family in and around the parish of Kettins, where Hallyburton House and Forest remain to this day. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Angus branch of the Haliburtons were also active as merchants and writers (solicitors) in Dundee and in Edinburgh.

Sir Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott was descended from the Haliburtons of Dryburgh through his mother. In 1820 he published a book called Memorials of the Haliburtons which is now available to read online at the Internet Archive.

Battle of Killiecrankie, 1689

One of the Haliburton lairds of Pitcur was killed at the Battle of Killiecrankie in 1689, fighting on the Jacobite side under John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee. He is mentioned in the folk song The Braes of Killiecrankie: "The bauld [bold] Pitcur fell in a furr [ditch]:

 

 

My Haliburton ancestry

My own Haliburton ancestors come from the same period of Scottish history. I've traced them back to the early 17th century in the parishes of Kettins and Newtyle. My family were tenants of land belonging to the Haliburtons of Pitcur, so are likely to be related in some way, but at present I do not know how.

 

 

Name	Father	Mother	Spouse	Marriage	Place	Death
John Haliburton						aft 26 Aug 1622
George Haliburton	John Haliburton		Susanna Halden	bef 30 Sep 1664
James Haliburton	George Haliburton	Susanna Halden	Agnes Smith	9 Jul 1677		bet 1698 & 1700
Jean Haliburton	James Haliburton	Agnes Smith	Charles Hay	8 Jul 1720	Coupar Angus, Perthshire	aft 22 May 1753

Postcard from the Past

From time to time I buy old postcards of ancestral places on eBay. They are usually very cheap and provide windows into a vanished world.

 

 

My latest purchase is a postcard of Coupar Angus, Perthshire, dating from 1917. My family has had a long association with the town, from the 17th century to the 1950s. Some of the names I am researching there are Clark, Fife, Gibb, Haliburton, Hay, Hood, Lowe, Malcolm and Smyth.

When my postcard arrived I turned it over, expecting to see the usual few lines, scrawled by a holidaymaker. Imagine my surprise at finding the following information instead:

 

 

I'm a genealogist so, naturally, I started to research R Bingham Adams. So far I've been able to piece together the following facts:

Richard Bingham Adams was born in Portsmouth in 1873 and married Violet Plater there in 1897. They had two children - Violet Plater Adams, born in 1898, and Dorothy Plater Adams, born in 1901. Richard appears in the 1891 census as a solicitor's clerk in Portsmouth. In the 1901 and 1911 censuses he was working for an insurance company, first in Horsham, then back in Portsmouth. During the First World War he served in five different units, including the Labour Corps. After the war he continued to serve in the Territorial Army, which awarded him the Territorial Efficiency Medal in 1928. His Medal Card gives the details of his previous service:

 

 

Richard died in Portsmouth in 1956, aged 82. His elder daughter, Violet, married Alfred Tree in Portsmouth in 1922. They had a son, Kenneth, who was born and died in 1924, and a daughter, Olive Violet, born in 1925. According to a well-sourced family tree on Ancestry, she is still alive.

I also did some research on Richard Bingham Adams' ancestry. His father, James Lewis Adams, was a pilot who worked for the Colonial Service in Port Louis, Mauritius, and all of Richard's siblings were born there. James himself was born in the then new town of Anglesey in the parish of Alverstoke, now part of Gosport, in 1833. His father was the wonderfully named Balthazar Bowman Adams, who was a ship's carpenter in the Royal Navy.

Balthazar's father, also Balthazar, was the son of Henry Adams, the Master Shipbuilder at Bucklers Hard, who built many famous ships of the Royal Navy. These included Nelson's favourite, HMS Agamemnon, and two other ships which saw action at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Balthazar Adams senior and his brother, Edward, inherited the thriving business when their father died that same year, but they over-extended themselves and by 1811 they were bankrupt.

10 things my ancestors did to annoy me

The Society of Genealogists sells a booklet called "My Ancestor was a Bastard". I have to admit that is often the way I feel about my own kin.

Here are 10 things they did to annoy me:

1. They settled where three counties meet. That way they could get married in one county, baptise their children in a second and be buried in a third, all without travelling more than a few miles from home. But I have to travel to three different record offices, miles apart, to have any hope of tracing their complicated genealogy.
2. Namesake cousins married namesake girls. I am either descended from John Coles and Mary Holloway, who married at Damerham, Wiltshire on 23 October 1737, or from John Coles and Mary Holloway, who married at Damerham, Wiltshire on 16 December 1738. I bet they are all having a good laugh about that one at the great family reunion in the sky.
3. They were not wise children and did not know their own fathers. Mary Ann Baldwin gave her maiden name as Blakey but her father's name as William Clayton. It took years to find the marriage of Susannah Blakey and William Clayton which proved he was her step-father. William Prebble Barnes invented a bank manager called George Barnes as his father. It took decades to find his illegitimate birth to Elizabeth Prebble.
4. They moved around. Joseph Bentley served as a Methodist minister in 17 different places. Frederick Davis lived in nine different counties and three different countries.
5. They baptised their children in batches, in a place remote from where they were born. Susannah Baldwin was born in Portsmouth and baptised four years later in Gravesend. Thomas Heale baptised his first four children as babies but made the last two wait over twenty years until he had died.
6. They left the country at census time. Thomas Bluett went all the way to New Zealand to avoid an entry in the 1841 census which would have told me whether or not he was born in Ireland.
7. They lied about their ages. Frederick Rayman claimed to be 23 when, aged just 15, he married his pregnant 21 year old bride. Catherine McCarthy stayed 40 for two successive censuses. Alice Wiles was 55 in one census and 72 in the next.
8. They kept just off the page of any printed pedigree. The Red Book of Perthshire contains detailed family trees for the Haldanes, Haliburtons, Reids and Stewarts which stop just short of connecting with my own proven research. Douglas' Baronage of Scotland mentions two of the children of John Smith of Glasswall, but not the daughter through whom I am descended.
9. They disappeared. John Winn sailed to North America, where he vanished. Clement Davis went out prospecting in the Nevis mountains of New Zealand and never came back.
10. They spent all the money. When William Winn died in 1891 he left £82,446 12s 9d, the equivalent of £5.5 million today. His son, William, inherited one quarter. By the time he died in 1906 it was all gone. In the space of 15 years he had squandered the equivalent of over one million pounds on yachts and gold plated taps.