ROBERT GAVINE (d. 1736) AND THE BOGHEADLY KIST

Our old dog used to have what we called a Mad Hour, every day at around 6pm. She would race excitedly from room to room, claws clattering on the old wooden floors of our cottage, pursued half-heartedly by her lumbering humans until we all collapsed in a heap in front of the log stove. It was utterly pointless but exhilarating for her and us, a release of all the discipline and control of our lives the rest of the day. She was a collie, a sheep dog, wired for obedient activity, bred to move only on the shepherd’s whistle. The Mad Hour was her Letting-Go time.

A dog with a bone - Maddy (1993-2005)

I’ve been doing some Bad Genealogy lately, my own Mad Hour. Like all Bad Things it’s not to be encouraged, but it’s been exciting to indulge in. I’ve been allowing myself some wild speculation for a change instead of the usual responsible, painstaking, dogged pursuit of correlated, checkable hard facts. The hard work of the latter is more rewarding in the long run because it deals in accurate truth; but the liberating What-If of the former is a chance to burn off some researcher steam on days and weeks when the facts are just not turning up.

I’ve been stuck at my 5x great grandfather John Gavine (1766-1839), a weaver from Forfar in Angus, Scotland. His is the generation of Gavines that takes me back into the eighteenth century, when records are much less complete. Regular British population censuses, for example, only began in 1841, two years after John’s death.

In the search for any concrete evidence of his parents, I have been casting my net ever wider, searching the birth, marriage and death records in ever increasing circles of space and time, until this week I have just started scooping up ANY Gavine who lived anywhere in Angus or neighbouring Kincardineshire at ANY time.

Scotland’s east coast north of Dundee – Angus, Kincardineshire and Aberdeenshire

I suppose that’s just Mad Genealogy – the Bad Genealogy is when you start to think, “Hmm, surely that Alexander Gavine born in such-a-year and in such-a-place is the same as this Alexander Gavine having children twenty-five years later twenty-five miles away?” It could be, but all you've got is coincidence, not proof.

The Mad Genealogy threw up some interesting results. There are distinct clusters of Gavines, groups of Gavine families living in Gavine hotspots up and down the east coast of Scotland. The Bad Genealogy was in starting to see patterns in the dates and places. I imagined that every time I extended my search another ten or twenty years back in time, the clusters moved a little further northwards towards Aberdeen.

Gavine clusters shown on Robert Dudley’s “Carte particolare della costa di Scotia”, produced in Florence c1647 (image from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society)

I told myself that this demonstrated a historic migration from Echt in Aberdeenshire at the start of the eighteenth century, to Arbuthnott and Inverkeilor in the mid-eighteenth, and into industrial Tayside around Monifieth and Dundee by the end of the century. I began to look for evidence to support this theory, searching for Gavines with dates and places that fit it and ignoring those that didn’t. The fact is that although the clusters exist, they have existed more or less simultaneously throughout my eighteenth century timescale. Sure, a James Gavine married in Monifieth in 1791; but another one got married there in 1678. Sure, William Gavine had a son in Aberdeenshire in 1706; but another one had a daughter there in 1800.

I fixed on one family, midway between Echt and Inverkeillor, which I told myself were part of the earliest stage of that migration. In the 1730s, one family of Gavines lived in the tiny scattered farming parish of Fetteresso, just inland from Stonehaven. Robert Gavine had at least two children born there, Elizabeth (b. 1732) and Robert junior.

From his children’s birthdates Robert senior must have been born around the turn of the century, before the Union of the Scottish and English crowns, before the Old and Young Pretenders, before the two rebellions, the ’15 and the ’45. He died young, on 14^th July 1736, in Bogheadly, a township of two or three farms within Fetteresso. He probably did not live to see the birth of his son, who (the parish records show) was baptised on 15^th September that year.

Bogheadly Farm, Fetteresso in Kincardineshire, from the south in 2008 (image from geograph.co.uk)

Robert Gavine lived in an ancient landscape. Angus and Kincardine with their natural harbours and fertile soils formed one of the largest of the Pictish kingdoms during the first millennium AD. Nor were the Picts the first to appreciate the area’s qualities. James Smith, a farm labourer, was digging sand from a hillock to the southwest of the Bogheadly farmbuildings one day in October 1863. He stumbled on a stone kist (a small stone-age slab-lined grave 90cm by 60) containing a crouched burial, a beaker and a crescent necklace of black jet beads. The National Museums of Scotland describe the necklace as “an expensive prestige item for ostentatious display, imported from Yorkshire sometime between 2300 and 1800 BC.”

With my Bad Genealogy hat on, I could convince myself that I’ve traced my Gavine line back not just to its early eighteenth century ancestors in Bogheadly but beyond – to its Pictish forebears and to an ostentatious, bead-flaunting Gavine woman from 2300 BC. In reality of course I’m still stuck at my 5x great grandfather John. Good ancestors, bad genealogy. Mad hour over.

Incomplete jet necklace found in a kist burial at Bogheadly, Fetteresso in Kincardineshire (image from the National Museums of Scotland, who now hold the necklace in their collection)

JEAN MUDIE (c1764-1842) AND THE HOWFF GRAVEYARD

Where are you, Jean Mudie? I know your name, your years of birth and death, your mother’s and father’s names (Ann, and James who died in 1776). I know your husband and your descendants for seven generations ending in me. I go back to you, but I can’t see where you came from.

Jean Mudie is one of my sixty-four 5x great grandmothers. I couldn’t put a name to most of the other sixty-three, so I suppose I should be quite pleased even to know hers. Hers was not a high family; and that far back, information is scarce. She was most probably a weaver like her husband John Gavine. He was born in Forfar, a weaving town in the county of Angus in Scotland, but moved to the nearby city of Dundee as a young man, perhaps in search of work. There he met and married Jean in 1792 at the age of 26, and there their four children were born.

A weaver and spinner in Dundee, with a loom and wheel of the sort in use at the end of the eighteenth century (photo: Dundee HeritageTrust)

John did well to catch a Mudie. The Mudie family were prominent merchants in the city for centuries – Sir Thomas Mudie was Provost (the Scottish equivalent of mayor) of Dundee from 1648 to 1653, and there’s a large Mudie population with its own plot in Dundee’s ancient burial ground, The Howff.

The Howff is considered one of the most important historical cemeteries in Scotland, some say second only to Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh. Like Greyfriars, the Howff sits on land once occupied by a Franciscan monastery, whose monks were known as grey friars from the colour of their habits. Both institutions were abolished by the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the Reformation in the late 1550s, and both were designated as new burial grounds for their respective cities in the early 1560s because the old ones were full.

The Howff, Dundee (picture by K.A. Laity from her splendid blog)

In Dundee the Franciscan church had been used by the city’s craft and trade guilds for assemblies. When the church was pulled down, they continued to meet on the site, and so the Greyfriars’ Yard became known as the Howff (the Scots word for a meeting place). One of the earliest references to such gatherings in the graveyard is for Dundee’s weavers. According to an article by the late Colin Gibson, the weavers are recorded as having "convenit within ye Holff and comowne burriall” on 13th June, 1585. (Holff is a variant spelling, Gibson notes, in the same way that Golf and Gowff are variants.) The now-demolished north wall of the yard used to carry the inscription “This is the braboners’ head roum.” Braboner is the old Scots word for a weaver.

The Howff was in use as a burial ground for three hundred years, from its designation by Mary Queen of Scots in 1564 to the last interment there in 1857. From early on the Mudies had their own "place" or plot there. Provost Sr Thomas Mudie was buried there in 1660, beneath the mortcloth. This "cloth of death" was available for rent from the city's Guildry to be draped over the coffins of its favourite sons and daughters, and the records still exist for its hire from 1655 to 1817. Each trade within the Guildry had its own mortcloth, although unfortunately the records don't show which cloth covered Sir Thomas. Ten other Mudies were similarly honoured.

The burial records for the Howff survive from the late seventeenth century onwards and in their transcribed form the entries for Mudies alone cover fourteen pages (compared to less than two for Gavines, for example). Amongst them there are some fifty references to Mudie weavers including, in 1772, the burial of Robert, son of James Mudie, weaver. Could this be an infant brother to Jean?

My head is full of Mudies and weavers and Howff burials. But the truth is, I don’t know what James Mudie did for work, or how or whether he and his daughter are related to the rest of the large extended Mudie family in Dundee. All I know is what I’ve told you, and in addition that both Jean and John Gavine are also buried in the Howff. There must be a connection somewhere!

ANNE DOUGLAS GAVINE (1870-1940) AND THE PASSING ZEPPELIN

I couldn’t help but notice after my recent blogpost that not one but two of my ancestors have had their whisky premises bombed out of existence in time of war. There was the Bristol Whisky Distillery, destroyed during the blitz on that city in December 1940 (admittedly some 113 years after the death of its former owner my 3x great grandfather Thomas Castle). And in an earlier conflict, the blended whisky warehouse in Leith part-owned by my great grandfather James Piper received a direct hit during the First World War.

I wrote a while ago about the reminiscences of one sailor in port at the time; he made the most of the gallons of “stagger juice” released by this explosion, which were flowing along the gutters of Leith like rain. Last week I came across some old notes I’d made from conversations with my grandmother in the 1980s, and they include a reference to the attack from a very different perspective.

I’d quite forgotten I’d made them – they date from an earlier and false start on the trail of my family tree and ended up as things do in a box of unrelated items buried at the back of the attic. Although my wife despairs, I thank goodness sometimes that I am a keeper and hoarder of archives – you just never know when they may throw up something worth the keeping and hoarding …

James Piper was very much alive at the time of the Leith bombing. After that event he got out of whisky and into farming; but at the time, he and his family were living in Cluny Gardens, a genteel street south of Edinburgh city centre and some distance away from Edinburgh’s northeastern port of Leith. Some of the grand houses of the area had been built by a Mr Gavine, the father of James' wife, Anne, including other houses in Cluny Gardens and in nearby Midmar Avenue.

Anne Douglas Piper nee Gavine (1870-1940)

On the night of 2^nd April 1916, when their youngest daughter my grandmother Jean was nearly eight years old, Anne came into Jean’s bedroom and gently roused her. “Jean, wake up! I want you to see something.” My Granny stirred sleepily. “Come over to window and look outside. Something you’ve never seen before.” Jean was wide awake now and curious. “What, mummy?” And Anne replied, “There’s a zeppelin at the window!”

Zeppelin L14, one of two which carried out the raid on Edinburgh

on the night of 2^nd/3^rd April 1916

(pic from Edinburgh’s War)

Well that got Granny rushing across the room and, with the lights out to preserve the blackout, opening the curtains onto the bright moonlit night. The scene is so vivid, and that must be because of the way Granny told it to me 25 years ago. Sure enough, there was a dirigible in sight over Edinburgh – an unforgettable sight, and made all the more memorable the next day when Granny’s father James came home with a piece of melted glass two inches thick from the burnt ruins of his warehouse. The bomb which fell there had caused £44,000 of damage.

The zeppelins also targeted Edinburgh Castle,

hitting Castle Rock and nearby streets

including this spot in the Grassmarket outside the White Hart Inn

Repelled from the port by naval batteries the zeppelins turned towards Edinburgh itself and dropped several more bombs including one which plunged through three storeys of a tenement building in Marchmont Terrace very near Cluny Gardens, but failed to detonate. (The Edinburgh Evenings News has an excellent article about the raid.)

I met an astronomer last night who talked of how he works back from the known to the unknown; from evidence present in the universe now he and his colleagues can find their way back by deduction to how things must have been only a few million years after the Big Bang which started it all. I feel the same way about Annie Gavine. I never met her and can never know her. But through conversations with my mother and grandmother who did, I can imagine.