Normally, when you start with family history you begin by building a family tree stepping back via your parents, your parents siblings, your parents’ parents etc, and along the way you might find some interesting tidbits, like the time your great-great aunt Mildred was arrested at a Suffragette demonstration in London in the 1900s, or that her cousin Wilfred made the serving maid pregnant while his wife was expecting, etc, etc.

Actually, what you rapidly find is that tracing everyone becomes massively unwieldy, so most people end up concentrating on their direct line of descent.

And if you have a relatively common surname, that’s probably the best you can do.

If you have an uncommon name and have access to digitised records you can do something a little bit different.

Now, I have a relatively uncommon surname, and the Scottish Government has funded the digitisation of church registers going back to the 1550’s, meaning you can search for births, marriages or deaths for a particular surname in a particular year or set of years.

Usually you get the father’s name, the child’s name, and sometimes, but not always the mother’s name, the date of birth, and the parish it was registered in

It’s not perfect, there’s no easy way of dealing with transcription error, or spelling eccentricities by the original clerk, and of course some of the registers are missing, lost, burned, or eaten by rats, but it’s pretty good.

So, I decided to try the following – use the Scotland’s people site to search for occurrences in the name ‘Moncur’ in a set of 25 year periods (ie a generation) forward from 1585 to 1750 and record the parish name associated with the name.

If my theory that some of our forebears took the name of the now vanished Moncur estate in Inchture, where they lived and worked, as a surname we should see them gradually spread out from Inchture to neighbouring parishes. If I’m wrong, or if there’s another group with the same surname we should get several clusters in different locations.

1585 is the date when the reformed Calvinist church started requiring people to have surnames.

In fact when you run the search, its only after 1605 that you start to see records of the surname ‘Moncur’, so we start from 1605.

I’d originally planned to run the searches through to sometime around 1800, but decided to stop at 1750 because agricultural reforms and the early industrial revolution were beginning to cause a migration from the land to the larger towns and cities.

I compiled this into a spreadsheet recording the number of occurrences of the name ‘Moncur’ for each parish’s baptismal record in a 25 year period.

Parishes of course change boundaries, are renamed, and the rest, so using Google Maps I worked out the distances by road from each parish church to Inchture. While changes in field boundaries etc might change the distances a little, I reckoned that that was good enough for my purposes.

I then used this information to split parishes into two groups, those more than 50km from Inchture, and those less than 50km from Inchture.

I have no justification for picking a 50km limit other than it was more than a day’s walk and might help show how many people remained close to Inchture.

As Inchture sits on the north bank of the Tay estuary, which was and remains a substantial barrier to travel the 50km circle turned out to be more a 50km semi circle.

And it worked better than I thought – the data quite clearly shows that majority of occurrences of the name Moncur in baptismal registers is within 50km of Inchture, and fit the hypothesis that the name spread outward from Inchture.

Except, the data also shows a small number of births with the name Moncur being registered in parishes around Kineff and Catterline, on the east coast of Scotland close to Dunottar castle.

This is quite interesting for two reasons – it’s only around 16km from St Cyrus (where my family had a farm in the nineteenth century, after moving from Glamis) and may be the source of the confusion as to how long we had been in the area as my family accidentally had the same surname as other people living in the area.

Secondly, it might also explain why I’ve totally failed to find a connection to Captain John Moncur – it would make perfect sense, given his sea going career, for him to be one of the unrelated Kinneff Moncurs as Inverbervie, the nearest harbour town of any consquence (and incidentally the birthplace of the magnificently named Hercules Linton, the designer of the Cutty Sark) is no distance at all from Dunottar, and for him to have been apprenticed to ship’s captain there, so I’m guessing he’s the John Moncur whose baptism was registered in Dunottar parish.

We can also guess that he had another job before being commissioned into the Royal Navy during the AngloFrench war of 1778-83 as he was old at 36 to become a Lieutenant, but which would make sense if he was al ready an experienced merchant seaman.

The spreadsheet can be downloaded if you want to play with the data. It was created with Libre Office and is in the open source ods format but should be readily openable by both Excel and Google Sheets.