• A subsidiary forename used in preference to the leading forename is italicised.

• A regularly-used diminutive or nickname used in preference to the given forenames is italicised and parenthesised.

eg My father Walter was always known as such within his own family, but my mother and other then family friends always called him Bill, or sometimes Wardlaw, while my step-mother and more recent family and friends always called him William.

eg My tragically early-deceased Uncle Robin was officially known as Robert but as an affectionate diminutive he was always called Robin.

eg My aunt Margaret Jane Valentine Waddell, and first cousin once removed James Robert Erskine Waddell both used their second name.

Note however that diminutive names such as Annie, Jessie, Minnie etc were often used as given names in Victorian times, just as Harry, Sally etc nowadays often are.

In fact they were seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century Presbyterian divines, Henry Erskine (1624-1696) and his two sons Ebenezer (1680-1754) and Ralph (1685-1752). Their Wikipedia links are

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Erskine_(minister)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebenezer_Erskine

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Erskine_(preacher)

(And if you haven't already seen their likenesses, click here, here or here to meet the Godly gaze from those very prints with which I became first acquainted with them)

These Wiki articles incorporate text from essays on Henry, Ebenezer and Ralph in a publication now in the public domain

Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 17, London: Smith, Elder & Co.

while Ebenezer and Ralph also feature in

The Erskines, 1900, Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, ("Famous Scots Series")

Ebenezer Erskine also ventured into print on his own account in 1738, with a 152 page volume rather catchily entitled

The Annals of Redeeming Love, with the Redeemer's Vengeance Upon the Grand Enemy of the Redeem'd. Being Several Sermons Preached at Sacramental and Other Occasions, on Is A. Lxiii. 4. For the Day of Vengeance is in Mine Heart, and the Year of My Redeemed is Come. By the Reverend Mr. Ebenezer Erskine, Minister of the Gospel at Stirling

the original family copy of which (densely printed and clumsily bound) is now with my cousin James. A more legible version can in fact be ordered via Google!

Henry's life as a dissenting minister was evidently tumultuous. He was twice married: first, in 1653, to a lady of whom little is known, and again to Margaret Halcro, a descendant of an old family in Orkney. Contemporary estimates of the total number of his offspring varied between 12 and 33, though by his own account he had but twelve. His two distinguished sons, Ralph and Ebenezer, were children of the second marriage. The family was certainly impoverished, and it is said that when he could not give his children a dinner he would give them a tune upon his zither.

Ebenezer was a very popular preacher and a man of considerable force of character. He was noted for acting on principle with honesty and courage, seeming to soar into the empyrean in this photograph of his statue at the Valley Kirkyard in Stirling (click here to see the monument also erected to him in Stirling).

And the esteem in which Ralph was likewise held is evidenced by the life-size bronze statue on a pedestal not far from the High Street in the centre of Dunfermline.

The subsequent linking of the Erskines and Waddells is documented in the family tree mentioned above, which is how their pictures came into our family possession; I'm extremely grateful to my brother Simon for supplying such excellent scanned versions of them, which are accessible not only from further up this Rude Forefathers section but also on the Erskines & Wardlaws page link in the opening paragraphs of this page.

Finally, rather a curious semi-legendary anecdote, probably concerning the second wife of Henry Erskine, and told to me on various occasions in childhood by my father, my aunt(s) and (most reliably) my grandmother.

It concerned a minister of religion (unspecified), long ago, sitting upstairs in his study by candlelight, grieving for his young wife who had (apparently) died suddenly and been buried earlier that day. Suddenly there was a creak of the door downstairs, and the sound of a delicate, but uncertain, ascension up the stairs.

"If my puir Maggie wisna deid and buried," he exclaimed, "I'd be minded that was her foot upon the stair."

Well of course, it was! She'd been buried with her only valuable possession, an ornate ring, and grave robbers had broken into her coffin and started to cut off her ring-finger. But the excruciating pain of this had roused her from her coma, she'd sat up in her coffin and the robbers had fled in terror.

The minister and his wife happily resumed their married life, and she went on to bear no fewer than twenty children. Funnily enough that does tie-in with the figures mentioned earlier.

But the oddest thing about the story is that almost precisely the same sequence of events is also recounted in an American setting at about the same era.

In fact, it gets better and better the further round the internet one searches. In one form or another, the story has evidently been an urban myth across Europe^1,  2 for many centuries, as this link recounts. And one of the instances is indeed our ancestrix Margaret Halcro Erskine! So that's the true version, then.