Issue No 7 NEWSLETTER FriendFriendss of Perth & Kinross Council Archive Honorary Presidents: Mike O’Malley, Provost of Perth & Kinross Council and Sir William Macpherson of Cluny and Blairgowrie We have great news this month – the Friends projects are up and running!! Thanks to the financial assistance of the Gannochy Trust, the friends have bought a desk, chair, colour printer and computer – with a flat screen – very swish! Several projects have been suggested, many of which are aimed at providing easi- er access by readers to the records in the Archive. To take into account the strengths and availability off our Friends Volunteer Group, three projects are now underway. As these and most future projects are electronic – hence the computer purchase – Michael Bolik, from Dundee University Archives was kind enough to give the Friends volunteers a tuto- rial about Access databases (which we are currently using). The long-term project is the creation of a database, which contains information in the Perth Burial Registers. After discussions with members of Tay Valley History Society and the Scottish co-ordinator of the National Burial Index project, the information con- tained in the Friends PBR database will be mappable to the NBI. So, we are not only be- ing of use to our local users, but we will be part of a national project – eventually, the da- tabase will be available on the Friends’ pages of the Archive website where remote searches will be possible. Other Friends volunteers will be starting quite soon, but Sheila Hay and especially Marjory and John Howat have been making serious inroads with the PBR’s. After only a few weeks, we now have over 250 completed records, which chronicle the name, address, birthplace, age and cause of death of persons as well as information about their funeral. Completion of the first stage of the project, hopefully by next summer, will mean that vis- itors will be able to use a simple search function to locate persons buried in Perth between 1844 and 1855. John is also fast becoming our computer and Access expert as he’s also been reading up and experimenting with ‘dummy’ databases! In parallel with the PBR project, Alex Porter has been working on creating a Name Authority File. Because names often are misheard or misspelt by officials, there is a need to clarify variations. So Alex has been painstakingly working his way through the existing index of names to produce a basic list of names with their variations. This means that a search of the database for one name, will also produce alternatives to consider. A second, short-term project arose after the Land Registry in Edinburgh gave us their unwanted OS maps. Consequently, Gavin Lindsay and Jim Ferguson have been spending the summer sorting through them, so that the Archive and the library’s Local Studies section can fill gaps in their collections. Any spares will be distributed to other libraries and societies. Thanks to the Gavin and Jim’s very hard work, this project is al- most complete. Perth & Kinross Council Archive, AK Bell Library, York Place, Perth PH2 8EP, Tel: 01738 444949, Email: [email protected] Finally, Alan Grant is about to start work on creating an electronic genealogy source list. This will summarise all records from all the Archive’s manuscript collections which have a genealogical aspect, thus helping family historians more easily find useful records. Alan is working on this at home, which is especially appreciated. His source list will be hopefully be the first of several; other source lists can be created, based on a vol- unteer’s particular interest, such as women, employment etc. So, those Friends who would like to work on a project, but can’t get in to the Archive during the day and have access to a pc at home – call me! Finally, don’t forget our next meeting will be a visit to Kinross House. If you would like to attend, complete and send us the form on the back of the newsletter. Jan Merchant STOP PRESS - STOP PRESS …. More heartening news has arrived in the shape of the very generous contribution of £400 from the JK Cairncross Charitable Trust through Thorntons WS, Solicitors. Although intended to help with the purchase of the pc, the Cairncross Trust have kindly intimated that money can be used for other costs involved in Boundaries of Research George Alan Kinnaird © National Library of Scotland John Adair, The Mapp of Straithern, Stormount, and Cars of Gourie, with the Rivers Tay and Jern , c. 1720 Having delved into the both the Archives and the Local Studies Library (which are both on the same floor of the A.K. Bell library) over a period, I would like to share with you some local lore from the Carse of Gowrie, which may help you with your research. It concerns boundaries, mental and physical. How does each one of us perceive the land to have once been? At first glance, this is something that appears straight forward. Obviously the main natural features were there; the hills, valleys, dens, and burns, around which the villages of what we now consider to be the Carse grew. But to understand them properly you have to discover their roots, both geographical and historical. The lat- ter, if you go back far enough, are lost in the mists of time. The Carse was a low lying 2 area of bog, in which only the ‘Inches’ were capable of being populated. Its difficult to imagine this today when we look at the Carse, as both the Braes and the Carse merge seamlessly under an agricultural landscape; but even that is still changing with new resi- dential developments, and roads. The roads we see today are yet another boundary to our understanding. We take them for granted as we drive along them, but many of them didn’t exist 200 years ago, such as the road from Kinnaird to Abernyte. The A90, which has just been upgraded, is a very mod- ern addition to the landscape, although at the eastern end it does start to follow the Old Carse Road, not that you would know it. The latter ran from Perth to Dundee on the Braes above what was once wet Carse. Local tradition still has it that the road from Scone came over the Sidlaw Hills to places such as Kinnaird and Rait. These routes can be found, together with many more, on James Stobie’s Map of Perthshire and Clackman- nan, published in 1783 and a copy of which is in the Local Studies Library. An earlier interpretation, showing only key roads and buildings in relation to the natural features, can be found on Timothy Pont’s map circa 1586. The National Library in Edinburgh has now digitised all of Pont’s maps, and has put them on a web site - www.nls.uk/pont/ index.html - to enable them to be more widely appreciated. Although Pont’s maps are not quite to scale they are of considerable use to historians, as they contain miniature repre- sentations of country houses, churches, and bridges. Both Stobie and Pont identify mills by showing a mill wheel. These maps help enormously to penetrate the past. Sadly, maps of the Carse itself are rare, as mapping tended to concentrate on the infrastructure between places, or from the late 1700’s on the layout of estates. Archives often hold estate plans among their deposited collections, and Perth & Kinross Archive is no exception. The estate collections of Fingask, Easter Greenside, Bonhard and Cronan are but a few. Estate plans give an enhanced view of the lie of the land and its usages in an age before photography. This leads us on to briefly discuss the boundaries of the Carse estates, which are not necessarily the same as those of the various parishes. To understand these estates, one has to go back to Norman times and discover their baronial roots. Melville, in his book The Carse of Gowrie, gives a considerable insight, but it is just a beginning. He didn’t have access to the Archives that we have, and nor did he have the time or resources to pursue each barony in the detail that we would want today. The ultimate barrier, the boundaries of your knowledge, is determined by how far you wish to pursue something and the questions that you ask on the way. For example, I recently discovered that there are two Fingask’s. I always knew that the one I wanted was the one adjacent to Kinnaird in Rait parish; but I didn’t know that the barony had been owned by the Bruce family, having erroneously discovered the Dundas’s of Fingask first. Their Fingask is in Rhynd parish, between the Tay and the Earn. With this newly acquired knowledge, I can now extend the boundaries of my research and ask new ques- tions of the vast collection of information in the Archives. For the genealogists amongst you…..courtesy of Jim Westcott, Joan Mackintosh and Donald Abbott (and the management refuses all responsibility) Genealogists never die, they just lose their census My family coat of arms ties at the back…is that normal? My family tree is a few branches short! All help appreciated Shake your family tree and watch the nuts fall! 3 Perth and Kinross Fabian Society: Saving an Archive Jim Ferguson Perth and Kinross Fabian Society was formed in the spring of 1967 and a group of the members decided to research the private ownership of land in Perthshire. The team con- sisted of John McEwan and his wife, Margaret, Alistair Steven, and myself.