On 26/12/2013 16:49, [email protected] wrote: > On 26/12/2013 3:02 AM, Gavin Bell wrote: > > "Aberdeen" is the city, the wider county is > "Aberdeenshire". > > > I have the counties of Ross and Inverness further > up the tree of my Aberdeenshire ancestors. Is the > correct way to punctuate their names to insert a > hyphen: Inverness-shire ? That's the way I've > usually found it, but occasionally I see the > snakelike Invernessshire, I don't know about "correct" but I tend to use "Ross-shire" and "Inverness-shire" as being less clumsy. > and a few writers have > waffled and use "the county of Inverness". It's a bit unfair to call that "waffling"! "County of X" is a perfectly acceptable (and widely-used) alternative to "X-shire". It does at least maintain the useful distinction between the county and its capital town. > Is their any reason other than traditional usage ... as a general principle, I would suggest that "traditional usage" is how most language develops - you will look in vain for any signs of logic behind most language changes. Laziness and fashion are the most common drivers of linguistic change ... > for Scottish counties to almost always include the > "shire" > syllable, whereas the English counties vary > widely? Always Yorkshire, for example, but never > Cornwallshire -- and then there are off and on > ones like Devon/Devonshire. Your premiss is faulty. For a good part of my lifetime there have been numerous non "-shire" counties in Scotland. In the Northeast alone, we have Moray and Kincardine, and a little way to the south we have Angus. Further afield are Orkney, Shetland, Caithness, Sutherland, Ross and Cromarty (which were amalgamated in 1891), Fife, West Lothian, Midlothian and East Lothian. And there are others which seem to treat the "-shire" suffix as optional, such as Bute, Clackmannan and Kinross. In the 19th century there was a more concerted effort to imitate English usage in naming the county after its chief town, which gave us jaw-breakers like Elginshire, Forfarshire and the immortal trilogy of Linlithgowshire, Edinburghshire and Haddingtonshire. Gavin Bell

Subject to what has already been said in this thread I would prefer to write up my records using correct place names, appropriate to what they were at the time the person lived there; upon reference to just a map, perhaps. I struggle with Angus rather than Forfarshire for purely personal reasons. There is a place "Kincardine" on the Forth, in Fife, and a Castle Kincardine, Aberdeenshire and County Kincardineshire known as "the Mearns" before it became part of Aberdeenshire which perhaps gives rise to a need to strive for what applied at the time. I am sure someone could expand upon it. Having had some practical application and experience of changing boundaries under Local government reorganisation in England & Wales, I dont think its a bad idea for our genealogy to check the position, if only from a map that applied at the time. I am sure we might find a similar topic in the archives of this List. I seem to remember offering this link before http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/sct/ where counties are listed. Further down the page it states "For a more detailed look at how county boundaries have changed over time, take a look at the detailed county maps.http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/sct/sct_cmap.html wherein there are maps listing Counties Pre 1890 and thereafter until 1929 and 1975 which I think *radically* changed local government constituency boundaries in the United Kingdom as a whole. There are also other links on the page containing information related to all of Scotland. Janet --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com

There was a joint parish called "Abenethy and Kincardine" in Inverness-shire when our family was there in the late 1700s. >From Genuki the Parish of Abenethy ["Kincardine" seems to have been dropped] has been part in Inverness-shire and part in Elgin [now Moray] [e.g. in 1868]ut is now fully included in the former. Ray Hennessy www.whatsinaname.net On 27 December 2013 12:45, Janet <[email protected]> wrote: > Subject to what has already been said in this thread I would prefer to > write up my > records using correct place names, appropriate to what they were at the > time the > person lived there; upon reference to just a map, perhaps. I struggle > with Angus > rather than Forfarshire for purely personal reasons. There is a place > "Kincardine" > on the Forth, in Fife, and a Castle Kincardine, Aberdeenshire and County > Kincardineshire known as "the Mearns" before it became part of > Aberdeenshire which > perhaps gives rise to a need to strive for what applied at the time. I am > sure > someone could expand upon it. > > Having had some practical application and experience of changing > boundaries under > Local government reorganisation in England & Wales, I dont think its a bad > idea for > our genealogy to check the position, if only from a map that applied at > the time. I > am sure we might find a similar topic in the archives of this List. > I seem to remember offering this link before > http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/sct/ where > counties are listed. Further down the page it states > "For a more detailed look at how county boundaries have changed over time, > take a > look at the detailed county maps. > http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/sct/sct_cmap.html > wherein there are maps listing Counties Pre 1890 and thereafter until 1929 > and 1975 > which I think *radically* changed local government constituency boundaries > in the > United Kingdom as a whole. There are also other links on the page > containing > information related to all of Scotland. > > Janet > > > --- > This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus > protection is active. > http://www.avast.com > > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the > quotes in the subject and the body of the message >

On 27/12/2013 12:45, Janet wrote: > Subject to what has already been said in this thread I would prefer to write up my > records using correct place names, appropriate to what they were at the time the > person lived there; upon reference to just a map, perhaps. The trouble with that is: (1) Many of the older sources are parish records, and the parishes were not originally assigned to any counties. The Kirk grouped sets of parishes into Presbyteries, and grouped Presbyteries into Synods. The Counties were divisions associated with the King's administration of justice, and unsurprisingly, there was little overlap of boundaries between the two systems. The individual citizen would certainly have known what parish he lived in, and might well have known that he lived in Buchan or Strathbogie - but it is far from clear that he would have known what county any of these places were deemed to lie in. (2) Cartographers had similar problems. Early maps of Scotland (such as Mercator's, Speed's and Blaeu's) certainly divide the country up, but while some of their divisions approximate to the territory and names of counties that we might recognise ("Rosse", "Murray" and "Argile"), they showed numerous others which are not equivalent, either in extent or name ("Buquhan", "Marria", "Ainzia") with any counties we would recognise. (3) The county names under which the majority of genealogical resources (OPRs, Civil BDMs, Census, Poor Law) are catalogued are often not those which might have been current when our ancestors walked the earth, but rather those which were in force when the said resources were indexed. This indexing happened in the mid to late 20th century, so you find that GROS, NRH, ScotlandsPeople, NLS etc tend to use "Angus" rather than "Forfarshire", "Moray" rather than "Elginshire", etc. (4) The major boundary changes of 1891 could mean (for example) that someone who lived in certain parts of Banffshire on 14th May 1891 would have woken up on 15th May of that year as a citizen of "Elginshire" - and if they survived another 30 years or so, they would have found themselves in "Moray". And if they were quite young in 1891, they could well still have been around to discover themsleves (from 1975) denizens of "Grampian Region". So what would be the "correct" name for the county where they lived? Fot these various reasons, it seems to me pointless to try and declare any particular county label as "correct", any more than to say that any particular spelling of a personal name is correct. If our ancestors could accommodate such variations, why can't we? I can manage to get my head round the notion that, while my father came from the county of Angus, his father was born in Forfarshire. But if you absolutely insist on a single label for the county, you can always fall back on the 3-letter "Chapman Code" - in this instance: ANS. Gavin Bell