The Baronage of Angus and Mearns — family tartans of 1856

In 1856 David MacGregor Peter published The Baronage of Angus and Mearns: comprising the genealogy of three hundred and sixty families … being a guide to the tourist and heraldic artist — a county-by-county walk through the landed families of Angus and the Mearns, each article carrying arms, crest, motto, seat and anecdote. And, for thirty-eight of the families, a tartan: the sett spelled out stripe by stripe, exactly as James Logan had done twenty-five years earlier.¹

That makes the Baronage the Dictionary's second-oldest dated source — a quarter-century checkpoint between Logan's 1831 table and the later clan books, and a different kind of witness: where Logan recorded clans, Peter records families, each tartan tied to a named house, its seat and its pedigree. Baxter of Balgavies, Duff of Careston, Ogilvy of Inverquharity — a dated 1856 statement of which cloth each family wore.

Logan's method, a generation on

Peter gives every sett in eighths of an inch of cloth, pivot to pivot, in Logan's colour vocabulary — azure, crimson, even Logan's splendid smalt (cobalt-glass blue), which Grahame of Morphie wears twice. The debt is unmistakable, and the entries confirm it structurally: eighteen of the thirty-eight share their colour order with a sett in Logan's table — the MacLagans wearing Logan's Logan, the MacTiers wearing his Ross, Davidson of Inchmarlo in his MacPherson, Stuart-Forbes of Fettercairn giving both a Forbes and a Stuart pattern.

But Peter copies none of them stripe for stripe. Every entry differs from its Logan counterpart in at least its proportions, and often more: Baxter of Balgavies wears what is recognisably Logan's Buchanan — minus one 2 yellow, ½ black repeat that Logan prints and Peter does not. Whether these are the printer's slips, Peter's own measurements of real cloth, or deliberate family variations, each is a dated 1856 reading in its own right — which is exactly how the Dictionary records them.

The book also attests two families sharing one cloth, in both cases saying so itself: the sett printed for MacInroy of The Burn is headed "Robertson and MacInroy Tartan" and reappears thread-for-thread under Robertson-Scott of Benholm; Davidson of Inchmarlo and Macpherson of Blairgowrie print the same sett — Davidson and Macpherson, both houses of Clan Chattan. In the Dictionary those pairs collapse into one cloth carrying both families' attestations, which is the model doing precisely its job.

Reading the entries

We transcribed all thirty-eight entries by eye from page renders of the 500 ppi University of Toronto scan — no OCR survives contact with an 1856 fraction glyph. All three Internet Archive copies' text layers were kept as a cross-check: each garbles ½ ¼ ¾ differently (£ J \ ^ | f), so they vote, and the page image rules.² Everything odd is transcribed as printed and noted: Campbell of Stracathro's Argyll sett prints 8 black, 1 black where its own symmetry expects an 8 blue between them; the appendix Fraser drops a repeat its first half prints; several setts open and close asymmetrically. One attribution was corrected along the way: the tartan our first inventory filed under Skair of Lunan Bank belongs to the Skene of that Ilk article — the Skair article ends with no tartan.

The eighths are the captured data. As with Logan, the threadcounts are rendered at the display calibration of 8 threads to the eighth-inch, and Peter named his colours rather than dyeing to a standard, so the palettes are the Dictionary's modern reading of his names.

The thirty-eight entries

Each family links to the cloth's page in the Dictionary; the last column names the Logan sett sharing the same colour order, where one exists.

The book itself

Three scans of the 1856 first edition are on the Internet Archive (public domain):

• University of Toronto copy — 500 ppi, the transcription's primary
• Allen County Public Library copy
• Google/Oxford copy

The extraction workbench — the page-by-page inventory, the faithful transcription with its corrections, and the conversion tooling — lives in the Dictionary's engine repository under sources/peter-1856, mirroring the Logan extraction; the importable records are data/sources/peter-1856/records.jsonl, and every entry above carries its provenance back to the page it came from.