While I still had some credit left on my account with Scotland’s People, the Scottish Government’s genealogy service, I thought I’d try and find the birth record for my great-great grandfather, who was rather unimaginatively named James Moncur.

I already knew that he was born in 1814 in Kinnettles which was part of the parish of Glamis.

Finding him was relatively straightforward, and his birth date was given as August 26 1814 in the old Kinnettles Kirk register:

As always, these records pose more questions than answers. The record reads

James Moncur in Moſside of Inglistoun had a child by his wife baptised and called James

(the weird character is a long s or ſ which was still used in Scots orthography at the start of the nineteenth century)

So, most unhelpfully, it doesn’t give either the mother’s name or the name of the witnesses, but it does give the fermtoun he was living at – it doesn’t of course mean that he was the tenant, merely that he lived there.

So where was Mosside of Inglistoun?

Inglistoun – which in Middle Scots literally meant ‘English Settlement’, toun being cognate with the Anglo Saxon tun rather than what we now mean by town – usually became Ingliston in the mid nineteenth century when the early, often monoglot English speaking, surveyors for the Ordnance Survey wrote place names down as they thought they should be rather than how they were pronounced, and indeed, there’s an Ingliston between Balkeerie and Eassie not too far from Kinnettles

But there’s two problems – Eassie has a church and you would have thought that the birth would have been registered there, rather than Kinettles.

What’s more there’s no Mosside of of Inglisto(u)n farm nearby.

The map dates from the 1860’s, so it’s not impossible that the farm could have disappeared in the intervening years.

However given that the birth was registered in Kinnettles it made more sense to look on the 1865 Ordnance survey map for Kinnettles, and there it was, a couple of kilometres north was a cluster of farms with the Ingliston element in the name

including Mosside of Ingliston.

However, sometime between the 1860’s and today, the farm seems to have disappeared leaving no trace, though the cluster of Wester, Middle and Easter Ingliston still seems to be extant …