Durness Parish Register - Part 2

[djct59]

There was a James MacKay, listed as "merchant in Glasgow" who married Mary Gunn in Arnaboll on 6th May 1815.

While Arnaboll is now almost inaccessible, the path from Eriboll to Arnaboll still exists and could be driven by car into the 1990s, although you would need a quad bike now.

"Your" James would be 32, so he might have retained some connection to his place of origin and married someone known to his family.

[wilros]

Yesterday I stumbled upon a document on my computer that I had forgotten about. Now that I re-discovered the file it is time to upload it here in the Durness Parish Register chat. Briefly, on 6 December 2020 I created a simple raw text file that contained a full copy of all of the transcriptions that Angi Lamb posted to her photo archive for the gravestones at Balnakeil. Angi's original archive was located at the URL https://public.fotki.com/rhemusaig/burial_grounds/durness_parish/durness_balnakeil/bk001.html. That web site went offline a few years ago after Angi passed away. The raw text I copied from her web site is a 36 page document, it contains text from 244 monument transcriptions, and is attached to this message. 

[djct59]

Thanks for this. I think Angi Lamb took the photographs and Christine Stokes copied the text, but both are no longer with us.

DU C-13 is now illegible, but the text was "An Honest Man Is The Noblest Work of God" (taken from Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man

DU C-55 "Seek Ye First The Kingdom of God"

[wilros]

djct59,

Thanks for the updates!

I made no edits in the transcription, but here I can post that for DU-C23, the table stone over the Balnakeil grave of my 4x great grandparents Hugh Ross (1731-1799) and Jean Manson (1739-1831), Chris and Angi rendered one portion of the monument inscription as:

"Mark ? behold the upright ? of that man is peace"

when it is obviously:

"Mark the perfect man and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace," Psalms 37:37, King James Version.

I recognized the full quote long ago because the son of Hugh Ross, my 3x great grandfather John Ross (1775-1857), used that exact same KJV verse on his headstone in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. I knew about the quote on the John Ross monument in the 1990s after my brother took a genealogy vacation to Nova Scotia and brought back many pictures.

[wr]

[meanno]

Many congratulations on providing that wilros - it is a tremendous resource for future research. Perhaps worth starting a thread with a suitable title to draw people's attention to it, otherwise these posts referring to it will just get buried (no pun intended!) over time.

[wilros]

meanno -

i apologize that i only copied the Balnakeil transcriptions. I think you have family graves in one of the other graveyards over by Loch Eriboll.

[wr]