Fornication, rebuke and absolution...tales from the kirk sessions

Remember how I found William Roy I’s baptism in the Auchtergaven parish register? It said:

1811, May 12 - James Roy, Glack, had a child in fornication by Anne Peddie, baptised, named William. 1

To find out more about this, I needed to consult the Auchtergaven kirk sessions. The kirk sessions were the local church courts, comprising the Minister and the elders of a congregation. Their meetings, decisions and records were documented by an elder who was appointed session clerk (often the local school teacher). The kirk sessions also had responsibility for poor relief and education. 

The minute books contain a record of hearings of any disciplinary cases on social and moral offences, and the decisions taken at those hearings, as well as a multitude of other lists or records, varying from parish to parish.2 

One of the roles of the kirk sessions was to uphold exacting moral standards, so they investigated and punished offences of ‘sexual deviance, drunkenness, quarrelling, doctrinal controversy, and breaches of the sabbath’.3 One of the more commonly investigated offences was ‘fornication’ by unmarried couples.4  So, I suspected I would find out more about James and Anne if I could read the kirk sessions. 

However, the records of the kirk sessions could only be viewed in person in the National Records of Scotland’s search rooms in Edinburgh - which was a slight obstacle to a researcher across the other side of the world. 

Until last year…

On 16 March 2021, more than 6,000 Church of Scotland kirk session, presbytery and synod records were made available via the Virtual Volumes system on Scotland’s People. It was a bonanza for locked-down genealogists all over the globe - suddenly we had free access to pages and pages of kirk session records (viewing the pages is free, downloading a page incurs a cost). I wasted no time in exploring the Auchtergaven kirk sessions and what I uncovered was very enlightening.  

Given I knew that William Roy I had been baptised in 1811, I started with Auchtergaven's 1810 kirk session minutes and worked forward. It can be a laborious process as the minutes are not indexed, so I needed to scan every individual page for any mentions of ‘James Roy’ or ‘Anne Peddie’. Plus of course, the entries are all handwritten in the ‘running hand’ script of that era. To assist in my deciphering and understanding of these records, I did a short on-line course from Glasgow University on Early Modern Scottish Paleography via the Futurelearn website (which, by the way, I recommend to anyone starting out with reading Scotland’s old records).

Helpfully, the Auchtergaven session clerk at the time (James Scott - more about him later...) kept fastidious records, with margin notes of the names of the parties.  A couple of pages in, I spotted the first mention of this case in an entry dated 24 March 1811:

Auchtergaven kirk session, Minutes (1808-1855) and Proclamations (1855-1861), Session 15th, 24 March 1811, National Records of Scotland, CH2/22/2, Image 00007.

I’ve transcribed this entry below:

Session House of Auchtergaven March 24, 1811
Session 15th
Case of James Roy & Anne Peddie

Which day the session met after divine service, and was constituted by prayer. The Minister reported that Anne Peddie sometime servant to John Fisher in the Glack of this Parish accused of being with Child, was summoned to appear before the session this day, but in consequence of her not being able to attend Herself, Her mother, who resides in the Parish of Little Dunkeld waited on him and stated that she was directed by Her Daughter the said Anne Peddie to inform Him that She was with Child and that She gave up James Roy in the Glack of this Parish as the Father of Her Child, also that the said James Roy has confessed that He was guilty of fornication with Her. The session closed with prayer.

James Scott, Session Clerk.5

Then, on 12 May 1811 (the same day that William Roy I was baptised), James was called to account in the very next entry on the same page of the kirk sessions:

Session House of Auchtergaven May 12, 1811
Session 16th
Case of James Roy

Which day the session met after divine service, and was constituted by prayer. Compeared the aforesaid James Roy, guilty of fornication with Anne Peddie, and was suitably rebuked by the Minister for his offence. He was then absolved from the scandal of it.  The session closed with prayer.

James Scott, Session Clerk.6

(Note - ‘compeared’ is an old Scots word which means to appear before a court as a party.)7

Finally, on 23 June 1811, Anne had her day in court:

Session House of Auchtergaven, June 23 1811
Session 20th
Case of Anne Peddie

Which day the session met after divine service, and was constituted by prayer. Compeared Anne Peddie of Little Dunkeld residing, formerly a few years in this place, guilty of fornication with James Roy of the Glack in this parish, being suitably rebuked by the Minister for her offence, she was absolved from the scandal of it. The session closed with prayer.

James Scott, Session Clerk.8

As a totally unrelated but interesting aside - the handwriting of the Auchtergaven kirk session minutes changes in 1815. The session clerk who recorded James and Anne's matter, James Scott (who was also the parochial schoolmaster) was himself before the kirk session, confessing that he 'had got his servant maid Ann Stewart with child' and a pro tempore clerk was appointed to record the ensuing and very involved proceedings. He was stripped of his session clerk duties and was temporarily suspended as schoolmaster, before he and Ann Stewart were finally 'rebuked and absolved' in January 1817.9    

So what did I learn from the entries regarding the case of James Roy and Anne Peddie? 

1. Anne Peddie had been a servant of John Fisher at a place called the Glack, and had been there ‘a few years’
2. James Roy was also from the Glack
3. Anne was no longer living at the Glack and was now at Little Dunkeld
4. Anne's mother was also from Little Dunkeld
5. William Roy I was born sometime between 24 March and 12 May 1811

Once again, this raised a host more questions for me…for instance, what does rebuking and absolving involve? how would this have affected their lives? what happened next with James and Anne? where or what is ‘the Glack’?

All questions to be explored in future posts here on The Roys of Auchtergaven!

Confused about how these characters fit into the family tree? Or where this action is occurring? You can always check  The Family Tree and Map pages for visual clues. 

Footnotes

1. Parish register entry of baptism of William Roy, 12 May 1811, Auchtergaven, Perthshire, Scotland, National Records of Scotland,  330/10/185.
2. Scotland's People, 'Kirk session records', https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/record-guides/kirk-session-records, accessed 28 January 2022.
3. University of Glasgow, ‘The Kirk Session’, Notes from Early Modern Scottish Paleography course on Futurelearn, https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/ems-palaeography/0/steps/30838, accessed 28 January 2022.
4. National Records of Scotland, Tracing your Scottish Ancestors: The Official Guide, 7th edn, Birlinn Ltd, Edinburgh, 2021, p.52.
5. Auchtergaven kirk session, Minutes (1808-1855) and Proclamations (1855-1861), Session 15th, 24 March 1811, National Records of Scotland, CH2/22/2, Image 00007
6. Auchtergaven kirk session, Minutes (1808-1855) and Proclamations (1855-1861), Session 16th, 12 May 1811, National Records of Scotland, CH2/22/2, Image 00007.
7. 'Compear v.', Dictionary of the Scots Language, Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd, 2004,  https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/compear, accessed 28 Jan 2022. 
8. Auchtergaven kirk session, Minutes (1808-1855) and Proclamations (1855-1861), Session 20th, 23 June 1811, National Records of Scotland, CH2/22/2, Image 00009.
9. Auchtergaven kirk session, Minutes (1808-1855) and Proclamations (1855-1861), National Records of Scotland, CH2/22/2, Images 00011-00025.

Seven generations of William Roy...or is it?

For seven unbroken generations in my family tree William Roy has had a son, also called William Roy. No middle names to differentiate - just William and Roy. Within the family we’ve always referred to them by Roman numeral - so my grandfather was William Roy IV,  my great-grandfather was William Roy III and so on. 

But what if the numbering was wrong? What if William Roy (husband of Margaret Campbell) wasn’t the FIRST William Roy? What if his father had also been called William? Would we need to revise our numbering system? This was one of the first research challenges I pursued, but it wasn't until I was able to access the records via Scotland's People that I could reach a conclusive answer. And given one of the Williams had his numeral tattooed on himself, you could say there was considerable skin in this game. 

  

The 1990s family tree printout I started my research with had no detail about William (or Margaret) other than their names. For each of the generations between myself and them, I was able to find sufficient evidential details to establish the lineage. The other piece of information I knew was that the family hailed from a place called ‘Bankfoot’ or ‘Auchtergaven’ in Perthshire. 

So, to establish whether there was a William Roy one generation before our ‘first’, I needed to locate William Roy’s death registry entry to find out what his parent’s names were. It took a bit of trial and error and a lot of triangulation with details of descendants, but eventually I found his death in Dundee:

Death of William Roy I 1

1878 Deaths in the District of St. Clement in the Burgh of Dundee
Name: William Roy, Illegitimate Farm Labourer, Widower of Margaret Campbell
When and where died: 1878, July Sixteenth, 3hr 13m AM, 30 Rosebank Street, Dundee
Sex: M
Age: 64 years
Parents: James Roy, Farm Labourer (deceased), Ann Peddie, afterwards Cowan (deceased)
Cause of death: Natural decay (6 months) as certified by Peter Young
Informant: John Roy, son, present
When and where registered: 1878, July 16 at Dundee

In this death register entry, the father’s name is given as James. This is one piece of evidence that William Roy is indeed the first of the unbroken line, however it is reliant on the informant (his son John) providing the correct information. I like to have at least two corroborating pieces of evidence to be certain I can rely on any information.    

So, now to look for William’s birth (which, given it is before 1855, would be recorded in the Old Parochial Registers). The age given on his 1878 death certificate is 64 years - which would mean a birth or baptism around 1814. Again, we’re relying on information given by a son, who may not have known exactly what year his father was born…so I used a wider year range of 1810 to 1820 to search Scotland’s People, which brought up 36 William Roys born in Scotland over that time period, but only one who had parents called James Roy/Anne Peddie, and that one was baptised in 1811 in Auchtergaven.

Baptism of William Roy I in the Auchtergaven Parish Register 2

1811, May 12 - James Roy, Glack, had a child in fornication by Anne Peddie, baptised, named William.

Putting these two pieces of evidence together, we can conclude that our numbering system is safe. William Roy I is indeed the beginning of the unbroken chain. No need to edit the tattoo. 

However, this also raises a whole lot more questions - such as, what was the relationship between James and Anne? Did they marry? How was the charge of  'fornication' dealt with by the kirk?

To investigate this further, my next stop is the Auchtergaven parish kirk sessions...

Confused about how these characters fit into the family tree? Or where this action is occurring? You can always check  The Family Tree and Map pages for visual clues. 

Footnotes

1. Death register entry of William Roy, died 16 July 1878, 30 Rosebank Street, Dundee, Scotland, National Records of Scotland, 282/03 0310, p. 104.
2. Parish register entry of baptism of William Roy, 12 May 1811, Auchtergaven, Perthshire, Scotland, National Records of Scotland,  330/10/185.

In the beginning...there was a dot matrix print-out

 

At some point after 1994 and prior to 2002, my Dad gave me a two page dot matrix print-out of the ‘Roy’ family tree that he had painstakingly compiled on a computer. At the left hand side of the first page were the names ‘WILLIAM ROY m. Margaret Campbell’, a horizontal line linked them to their son and his wife, ‘WILLIAM ROY (1846-1918) m. Isabella Sutherland (1845-1914), and from there the lines split into William and Isabella’s eight children and subsequent generations. 

At that point in time, seven descending generations were recorded from William and Margaret, (my great-great-great-grandparents) through to the first children of my generation.  It had been compiled the ‘traditional’ way - based on memory, my Dad consulting various family members, and using known records. I kept that print-out in a folder in my filing cabinet.

In 2002, I became aware that genealogical research was rapidly advancing on the Internet, and I started investigating what records were available on-line. I pulled the Roy family tree out of the filing cabinet and used it as a starting point. 

Prior to the Internet, family historians had to laboriously trawl through original parish documents at local record offices to uncover long-forgotten birth, baptism, marriage and death details of earlier generations, or mail off requests to record offices to printed certificates to be received by mail. From 1973 (still pre-Internet times) some genealogists could consult the International Genealogical Index (IGI) on microfiche - which was a project of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) to aid their members trace their ancestors. The original IGI was available to public users in microfiche format in the mid-1980s and contained about 108 million entries which had been complied from original historical documents. By the late 1990s a CD-ROM version was available and there was over 200 million entries. In 1999, the FamilySearch website (the LDS family history website) was created and IGI entries were gradually released online by region…which is the point at which I became aware of this.1

One of the datasets the IGI had at that time was the Old Parochial Records of Scotland (OPR) - which are the records of the established Church of Scotland including registers of births/baptisms, marriages and/or proclamations of banns and (sometimes) deaths or burials. Coverage of each parish varies greatly depending on what original documents have survived, but at the extremes, records date from the late 1500s through to 31 December 1854 (when Scotland’s statutory registration took over).2 

Nowadays, the best place to search and view the OPR is the official Government Scotland’s People website which has the original images available for viewing and download (at a cost), but Scotland’s People didn’t exist in 2002.

So, armed with the original print-out of the Roy family tree and a lot of patience, I explored the search functions of the IGI, and slowly started piecing together further details. It was the start of an addiction. It’s now been almost 20 years since those first experimental searches on the IGI, and genealogy on the Internet has exploded dramatically, with digital access now available to Scottish datasets a lone researcher half a world away could only dream about back in the 'noughties'. 

Over that time I have plugged away at various twigs on the family tree, returning often to the original Roy branch and fleshing out its various characters. It’s the stories of our ancestors that draw me in to family history research. The names, places and dates are the scaffolding, but it’s the detail of their lives that really fascinates me. On this blog I aim to capture some of these ancestral stories to pass on to family members present and future.   

Confused about where these characters fit into the family tree? Or where this action is occurring? You can always check  The Family Tree and Map pages for visual clues. 

Footnotes

1. Familysearch, 'International Genealogical Index', https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/International_Genealogical_Index, accessed 27 January 2022.

2. National Records of Scotland, Tracing your Scottish Ancestors: The Official Guide, 7th edn, Birlinn Ltd, Edinburgh, 2021, p.33.

Where is Auchtergaven?

Auchtergaven is a Church of Scotland parish located about 8 miles (13 kilometres) North-West of the Scottish city of Perth and 7 miles (11 kilometres) south of Dunkeld. Prior to 1974, Auchtergaven was in the old county of Perthshire, which was replaced by the Tayside region, and then in 1996, became Perth and Kinross Council Area. The red outline on the map below (from the Boundaries Viewer on the National Library of Scotland maps website) shows the parish boundaries c.1840-1880s. 

Notably, the 'cut-out' section in the map below, which is shown as Methven, is 'an isolated tract four miles in length, but of very small breadth, called Tullybeagles, belonging to the parish of Methven'  but because of its proximity to Auchtergaven and distance from the village of Methven several miles to the South, inhabitants attended the Church in Auchtergaven.1 This is an important detail in tracing the story of William Roy I's family.

Image reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

The marker on the 1807 Aaron Arrowsmith Map of Scotland below is located at the Parish Church of Auchtergaven - now the village of Bankfoot.   

Image reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

This map (the full 1807 Aaron Arrowsmith Map of Scotland) shows the location of Auchtergaven in relation to the whole of Scotland.

Image reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

The village of Auchtergaven is now known as Bankfoot, and other settlements in the parish include Stanley, Waterloo, Tullybelton, Obney and Meikle Obney. In the 2011 Scotland Census, the population of the village of Bankfoot was 1,257.

Bankfoot is a pretty village situated at the base of an elevated ridge, with the old parish church located on the top of the ridge and therefore visible from a distance. 

When I was in Scotland in August 2019, en route from the Highlands to Edinburgh we detoured to pay a quick visit to Bankfoot. The village itself mostly dates from the mid-1800s, when the cottages were built on ‘lands leased for that purpose by Mr Wylie’ and were inhabited by people ‘employed in weaving from the manufacturers of the neighbouring towns, and in various trade’.2

The Bankfoot Inn on the village’s main road however was built as a traditional coaching inn in the 1760s. It was a place for travellers on the road to rest and stable their horses for the night. It was closed the day I was there, but I chatted to one of the staff and was able to pop my head in. I'd love to come back and stay at the Inn, which is now a family-run small hotel with two bars and a restaurant. 

Bankfoot Inn, August 2019. Picture: Alison Dennison

Interior of Bankfoot Inn, August 2019. Picture: Alison Dennison

The 19th Century Auchtergaven Parish Church (seen in photos below) was located on the top of hill alongside the village’s main street. In February 2004, a fierce fire ripped through the building and it was destroyed. Remnants of the church ruins remain, surrounded by the graveyard, but the tower is to be demolished due to stability and safety concerns and as a result, access to the graveyard is currently (January 2022) restricted.3 

This version of the church was built around 1812/1813 in sandstone in a Gothic Style with a pitch-pine ceiling.4 There were previous churches on the same site, with the 1796 Statistical Report describing the existing church at that time as being 'in very bad disrepair'.5

Ruins of Auchtergaven and Moneydie Parish Church and surrounding graveyard, August 2019. Picture: Alison Dennison 

Ruins of Auchtergaven and Moneydie Parish Church, August 2019. Picture: Alison Dennison

It is very likely that William Roy I and Margaret Campbell and their children attended this church while they lived in Bankfoot. 

Confused about where these characters fit into the family tree? Or where this action is occurring? You can always check  The Family Tree and Map pages for visual clues.  

Footnotes

1. Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Scotland: From Abbey to Jura, S. Lewis and Co., London, 1851, p.122.

2. Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Scotland: From Abbey to Jura,  p.122.

3. 'Proposal to demolish Bankfoot church tower scrapped', Daily Record, 27 December 2019, https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/proposal-demolish-bankfoot-church-tower-21169577; 'Bankfoot woman’s anger after contractors repairing church cause damage to her land', The Courier, 1 October 2021, https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/perth-kinross/2629521/pic-update-bankfoot-womans-anger-after-contractors-repairing-church-cause-damage-to-her-land/.

4.'Family history', https://bankfootchurch.org/family-history/, accessed 21 January 2022.

5. Sir John Sinclair (ed), The Statistical Account of Scotland, William Creech, Edinburgh, 1796, p.552,  https://stataccscot.edina.ac.uk/static/statacc/dist/home.