Post by Vivien MartinDear Listers
I am trying to find the parents of Sueton Grant b 1702 d. d. 27 Sept 1744
Newport Rhode Island. On his tombstone is the coat of arms for Grant of
Gartenbeg. According to a letter of introduction he had, he was from
Belvadone, Inverness and his parents were Donald Grant and Marjorie Stewart
"who descends from the Baron of Kinveachy in the County of Banff".
I have been unable to find Belvadone, Inverness on any of the old maps I
have consulted nor found the marriage of a Donald Grant of the Grants of
Gartebeg to a Marjorie Stewart.
Would consulting "Retours of Service of Heirs: 1544 - 1699" be of use. Any
other suggestions welcome.
You may have already considered this, but please be VERY careful with Coats
of Arms on New World memorials. They are not always everything they appear
to be - there's at least one burial ground that is famous for its carving -
this quote is from Sean Murphy's discussion of someone claiming a spurious
Chiefdom: "While it appears reasonably certain that the 1785 memorial is
located at Steele Creek, North Carolina, analysis of other armorial
gravestones in this cemetery on the newsgroup rec.heraldry indicates that
the arms are either assumed or the imaginative work of the Bigham family of
headstone carvers." (from
http://homepage.tinet.ie/~seanjmurphy/chiefs/akins1.htm ) "Baron" is not a
title generally used in Scotland, although (before anyone jumps on me) I'm
sure there were a few people using it.
That said, I would approach the problem more simply - track both families
(Grant and Stewart) without worrying about claimed estates, and see whether
the estates turn up - that way you'll save time that might have been spent
of false trails, and if they ARE related, it'll show up. Coats of arms are
personal possessions in Scotland, and not useable by everyone with the same
name (or even shared ancestry).
You could also check to see whether there WAS a Grant of Gartebeg, and
whether the family had a son of the right name and age who has no recorded
marriage or anything else (baptisms of children, etc) in Scotland.
I've tried feeding the place names you give into the search engine on the
National Archives of Scotland site http://www.nas.gov.uk/ - some of the
others turned up, but no spelling variation I can think of turns anything up
on Belvadone - which looks suspicious since land grants and other
estate-related papers are in NAS. Even the names of farms (rather than
estates) will turn up something. Nothing turns up using the advanced search
(on works rather than names) in the somewhat more flexible search engine for
testaments at Scottish Documents http://www.scottishdocuments.com.
Belvadone, whatever its spelling, might have been the name of a farm, in
which case you may find it in the 1st Statistical Account for
Inverness-shire or Banff but you'll have to read the whole entries unless
you want to subscribe for the text search
http://stat-acc-scot.edina.ac.uk/stat-acc-scot/stat-acc-scot.asp
By all means, check the Services of Heirs - I check ANYTHING I come across
for anything useful - but don't tie your search to those estates.
Good luck,
Lesley Robertson