James, You do seem to have been mining deep into your past correspondence :-). "dative" simply means in origin "given" or "to do with giving," so grammatically indicates the aspect of one person or thing giving to another person or thing. In Scottish law of inheritance a "testament dative" is little more than an inventory, legally drawn up, showing the property to be divided between the legal heirs (and also the debts owing by the estate) when the legator died intestate; a "testament testamentar" was one drawn up by, or at least acknowledged by, the legator in his/her lifetime. The testament I referred to, I think, referred to the widow of the tenant of Marchbank Farm, where both one of the children and also the "cautioner" (usually a close relative, appointed to see that the terms of the will were carried out) were named Samuel Marjoribanks and I suggested that the dates fitted with the possibility that one of them, probably the son, could have been your original ancestor Samuel - but this is no more than an educated guess. I don't know nearly enough about Scots law to distinguish accurately between different types of tenure, I'm afraid. Roger