Charlotte Stuart MS Cattanach was recalled on the 1875 death certificate of her daughter Helen Gordon Stuart. Neither her birth nor baptism appears to have been recorded but from the information inscribed on her gravestone that she died in 1848, aged 72, it might be inferred that her birth year was either 1775 or 1776. Wimberley does not specify his sources and it is hard to avoid the impression that he asks us to take a great deal on trust. However, the fact that Charlotte’s daughter was named Helen Gordon Stuart is in itself powerful evidence that her maternal grandmother was indeed Helen Gordon and in any event the link to her parents is positively established by a wealth of supporting documentary evidence.

The House of Gordon, edited by John Malcolm Bulloch, (1886, digitized by the Internet Archive 2013), Volume II, supplies the dates relative to Charlotte advanced by Wimberley. This volume relies upon an unfinished pedigree by George Stuart, schoolmaster of Oathlaw, a grandson of Helen Gordon, and upon the personal recollections of George and his brother, Rev. Harry Stuart, Minister of Oathlaw.

According to the 1935 pedigree chart accompanying Captain Douglas Wimberley’s Notes On the Family of Gordon of Terpersie with a Table of Their Descent, Charlotte Boyd Cattanach married John Stuart in 1792. To this might be added that John was married under the alias of McAndy and that it is a matter of record that the actual year was 1796.

‘Charlotte Catanach daughter of the said George Catanach, and spouse to John Stewart in Newmill’ was bequeathed the sum of £20 in the 1805 Last Will and Testament of her maternal aunt, Margaret Lindsay MS Gordon, who died in January of the following year. However, it may be taken that she did not receive her money until 1821 or 1822, since it was expressly reserved, pending the death of the longer liver of her parents, the interest to be applied to them or their survivor in the interim period.

The Rev. Harry Stuart is quoted (at p. 132) as recalling his mother in the following terms:

My own loved and gentle-spirited mother, her (Helen Gordon’s) daughter, did her all justice as to looks. . . . She had been trained at the boarding school where the best old Jacobite blood was collected.

The Rev. Harry’s book, Agricultural Labourers, As They Were, Are, and Should Be, In their Social Condition, published by William Blackwood & Sons, of Edinburgh and London, in 1853 (1854 reprint), contains the further fond recollection of his departed mother (p. 72):

I remember when I began to read Virgil at the school, by help only of a small Latin dictionary for no kind of learning was made easy then, far less that of Latin and Greek being sorely puzzled about the history of the heroes and the geography of the places ; and as I made my complaint of it to my kind mother, I found she knew Dryden’s Virgil and Pope’s Homer, to repeat very much of them from memory. On asking when and how she came by all this – “Why,” said she, “Harry, “when I and my sisters were girls, our father read as we spun, and the old poets were our favourite books ; and so, what with him constantly reading them over, and ourselves peeping into them, we had the most of them by memory.”

The picture is further complemented by a footnote, at pp. 72-73:

I know something also of the education given in the boarding-schools of those days, as my mother had two aunts who kept one in Cromarty ; and as their father had suffered in the “cause,” they received every encouragement from those Highland chiefs who favoured it, and suffered for it too. My mother and aunts had the advantage of being taught and trained at this Jacobite school, coming home full-fraught, of course, with the spirit and tales that prevailed in it. It seems to have been really a training, as well as a teaching school, for the “tug-rug” of domestic life. Whatever it was, it gave me a mother, to whose advice and early teaching I do owe more for real useful living, than to all the schools I have ever been at, and all the books I have ever read of a secular kind.

Harry recalls another reminiscence of childhood involving his mother, at p. 68:

There was then a sort of private mutual training system went on, and, as I said, this system lasted some twenty or thirty years longer in my native country than it did in this, before it was starved out there also ; so that I remember, in my childhood, begging sometimes of my mother to be let go, and get tales and songs from the “lasses,” in the croft-houses, at their wheel. Very often some three or four of them convened, and span in a neighbour’s house, for company to each other. There was then no end of songs, and ballads, and legends, and countings of “kin,” tales of battles, and marriages, sweethearts, and sermons, just as the idea was started. I heard many a heroic ballad then, which I have never been able to see in print. There was a great deal of mirth, but as much of innocence, for no rude fellow dared to set his nose in at the door to take any undue freedoms. There was the Bible, too, with the Shorter Catechism, lying on the “stock o’ the wheel ;” and when a parochial visit was expected from the minister soon, for weeks before, it was all the learning of Catechisms, and Psalms, and verses of Scripture, - every one trying to outdo her co-spinner in getting “by heart” the Scriptures.

When Charlotte’s son, Robert Stuart, married Mary Ross at the end of 1821, Robert’s younger brother, Harry, wrote to his aunt, Charlotte’s sister, Elizabeth Catanach, remarking that ‘my mother will be well free of her great fatigue.’

Harry Stuart to Elizabeth Catanach, 27 December 1821

Charlotte’s state of health was touched upon in a letter written by Harry to his cousin (her niece), on 11^th August 1829:

My mother was quite well when I saw her - when I say quite well – I take into account her ordinary head aches of which she will never get rid.

Harry Stuart to Jane Mellis, 11 August 1829

The footnote quoted above continues with a recollection of the events leading up to Charlotte’s final illness and death:

Although for many years a very great invalid, and living in strict seclusion, she never for a moment lost either her strong practical sense or her cheerfulness. And I do thank God that He never allowed me either to propose or to take a single step in my life, without consulting her, if at all possible, till some five years ago, when in great suffering, but in a strong, cheerful, blessed hope, she turned her head on my arm, and said, for the last time, and with her last words, “May the Lord bless you, Harry!”

According to the www.findagrave.com transcript of the family memorial stone in Tarland Kirkyard, ‘Charlote (sic) Boyd Catanach’ died on 18^th January 1848, aged 72.

Loose End

An unresolved question necessarily surrounds the personal history of Charlotte Boyd Cattanach - in whose honour was she named? Attention is drawn to the following entry in the Cruden (Aberdeenshire) Parish Register, dated 17^th April 1773, about three years previous to her birth:

Mr Charles Gordon of Wardhouse & the Honourable Mifs Charlotte Boyd contracted marriage, were three sundry times proclaimed & married.

This seems rather too much for simple coincidence and the suspicion naturally arises that Charles Gordon was Charlotte’s maternal uncle of that name, so that she was named after her aunt by marriage; an interpretation, unfortunately, which is expressly contradicted by Wimberley (A Short Family History of the Later Gordons of Beldorney, and of Beldornie, Kildrummie, and Wardhouse, p. 18), who identifies him as Charles Edward Gordon, XI, Laird of Beldorney, and 5^th of Wardhouse and Kildrummie, a son of John Gordon of Beldorney. The same source identifies Charlotte, Charles’s first wife, as a daughter of the Hon. Charles Boyd, who was himself a son of the 4^th Earl of Kilmarnock. The connection, if any, to the Gordons of Terpersie, if any, is unclear.

It might also be noted that the ‘Mr’ was evidently a mark of social status, for none of the other grooms in the immediate vicinity was accorded a similar courtesy.

This matter is raised here merely as a footnote and is therefore set aside for the consideration of interested parties only and is not presented as part of the main text.

Forebears

The Wimberley study identifies Charlotte’s parents as George Cattanach and Helen Gordon.

Brothers and Sisters

Bulloch (p. 132) enumerates the following children of George Cattanach and Helen Gordon, although, it would appear, not necessarily in the correct order:

(1) Robert Cattanach : baptised March 1, 1763. The father and mother are described as “in Drumnahive of Kildrummy”. The sponsors were John Gordon in Mill of Smithstown, and Helen Dawson in Colithyie (Catholic Register of Baptisms at Huntly). (2) Harry Cattanach. He went to St. Vincent. Mr. Robert Stuart has several letters written by him from there dating from 1796 to 1801. (3) Margaret Cattanach: married Rev. George Gibb, Episcopal minister, Turriff (who died before 1806). She got £20 under her aunt Mrs. Lindsay’s will and that lady’s mulberry striped gown.

Robert Catanach

(4) is Charlotte herself. As stated above, Charlotte’s precise place in the sequence is unclear. A clue in this direction is provided by the Last Will and Testment of her brother, Robert Catanach, who died in 1828. The three siblings named as beneficiaries were Margaret Gibb, widow; Elizabeth Catanach, spinster and Charlotte herself. Margaret was described as an older sister, Elizabeth simply as a sister, and Charlotte as a younger sister.

(5) Anne Cattanach. This is presumably the same Ann whose passing at the age of 22 is recorded on the family gravestone; also commemorated are Mary, who died aged 18, and Jean, 13 months, neither of whom appear in Bulloch’s list. (6) Elizabeth Cattanach : she got £34 under her aunt Mrs. Mary (Note - Mrs Lindsay’s Christian name appears actually to have been Margaret) Lindsay’s will. (7) Isobel Cattanach : married William Mellis, manufacturer, Huntly. She got £10 under her aunt Mrs. Mary (Margaret, see supra) Lindsay’s will. They had : — i. Anne Mellis. ii. Helen Mellis. iii. Isobel Mellis. iv. Jane Mellis : died June 19, 1879 ; married William Leiper (died August 17, 1867), and had : — (i) William Leiper, R.S.A. (born May 21, 1839), the well-known architect. He has called his house at Helensburgh “Terpersey”. He possesses various relics of the Terpersie Gordons. He is unmarried. (ii) Isobel Cattanach Leiper. (iii) Jane Leiper.

Margaret Catanach

Elizabeth Catanach

Isobel Catanach