About

In 1990 I started gathering information about the Loggie family.  I was under a completely erroneous idea that the family originated in the village of Loggie in Ross but soon came to realise that this was not the case.  We also believed at the time that we were from the Fraser of Lovat clan.  This was also shown subsequently not to be the case.

The original information came from the records of births deaths and marriages and, in times before the internet were copied down long hand into a notebook from the records in Inverness library.  The task of transforming these names and dates into something more meaningful was painful and took a very long time, almost 10 years of patchwork!

But although having traced the family and some of its many branches into a genealogical map was satisfying in itself I was left with the nagging doubt that I did not know the context of these people.  What were the times that they lived in like? What was their lifestyle, their day to day.  This led to an extensive exploration of the times and social history that the “family” lived in.  It is not a social history of the whole of Scotland as the “family” tended to be together geographically at any one time.  As is the case with most Scottish families, the need to move away from Scotland to find opportunities for a better life presented themselves.  One of the major branches of the Loggie family moved to Canada and, although there is some history of their times, the story it is far from complete and needs to be completed.

Where possible I have tried to keep to convention and the research is presented in logical chunks based on teh subject and in broad historical terms.  Because of the vagaries of the British education system, I have not had a formal history class since I was 13 so I apologise for any blunders.  Where possible I have cited the sources (both primary and secondary) of the information and I would encourage readers to follow up on them.  I have come across articles or Ph.D theses have taken a similar approach (an example would be Rural society in Scotland from the Restoration to the Union: challenge and response in the Carse of Gowrie, circa 1660-1707) but I can not find anything quite as extensive as this project.

I would welcome contributions to this site to complete or add to the material already here.  Please contact me if you wish to contribute.

Nick Loggie, December 2015.