Graham Scottish Border Clan in the Raney Tree

The Brackenhill Pele Tower was built in 1584 by the infamous border reiver Ritchie Graham on the site of an earlier tower perhaps dating back to the 13th Century. Now a B&B

 While reading the book I've quoted in past blogs, Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fishcher, I determined that most of our ancestors came to Virginia and Maryland from southwest England in the 17th century and were of the group called Cavaliers, who were Church of England (Anglican), which may have included the Raineys, although they appear to have immigrated from Northern Ireland in the 17th century. We don't have ancestors from the Puritan group that settled in New England (that we learned about in school). We don't appear to have ancestors from the early Quaker group that settled in Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  I was beginning to think we didn't have anyone from the fourth immigrant group, the Borderers, who sailed across the Atlantic in the first half of the 18th century from Northern Ireland and the Border region of England and Scotland, and were mostly Presbyterian.  As I continued to research, though, there they were -  the Grahams and the Kerrs, traced up through wives' families. So now, I want to give you some Border history about the Grahams, a Riding Clan of the Scots Borders.

On both sides of what now is the western end of the Scottish - English border is territory that in the 14th century was called the Debatable Lands. Both kingdoms claimed it. Constant warfare raged between the English and Scottish crowns along the entire contested border, sometimes large armies battling, but mostly cross-border raiding by lords of castles. They burned towns and crops, stole cattle  (sheep, too, but were awfully slow) and killed anyone in their way. The Graham clan had moved into this contested area between the end of the 13th to the middle of the 14th century, where they became "a lawless people, that will be Scottish when they will, and English at their pleasure."

We have two Graham women in our line - 1) Mary Graham (b. Lancaster County, Penn. 1737- d. 1809 Randolph County, N.C.), our 6th great-grandmother, whose father Michael Graham allegedly came from Northern Ireland to Pennsylvania. She married Edward Sharp, future Revolutionary War colonel, about 1761. The Sharp family emigrated from Pennsylvania about 1763 with the Dougans, Grahams, Kerrs, and other Presbyterians to North Carolina Colony. It was the Sharp daughter, Hannah (our 5th great-grandmother), who married the future Colonel James Dougan, whom I wrote about HERE . 2) Isabel or Isabella Graham (b. 1744 in Monmouth, N.J. - d. 1833, Knox County, Tenn.) was our 5th great-grandmother, the mother of John Roberts, father of Millie Roberts, who married James Rainey in Pulaski County, Kentucky,, in 1832. James' story is HERE. Isabel's father was Nathanial Graham, who apparently immigrated from across the sea before her birth.

Brackenhill Pele Tower before restoration as a B&B

Back to the Border region. We are descended from Border Reivers, clan-loyal marauders, existing by intrigue and force of arms, often turning on one another. You can read about their violent history HERE.  More specifically, we are descended from the Graham clan (and the Kerr clan -Mary Kerr married Thomas Hill Dougan in North Carolina in 1745, and her brother married a Graham). By 1604, James I and IV of England and Scotland was ruling both kingdoms. He was fed  up with the reivers, especially the Grahams, who owned five pele towers (in red on the map below) in the Debatable Lands and lived on both sides of the Border.



George MacDonald Fraser, author of Steel Bonnets, the Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers, wrote about their condition at the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, "[N]o fewer than sixty Grahams were outlaws, for murder, robbery and other crimes; they had despoiled above a dozen Cumbrian villages, sheltered felons, fought the Warden’s troops [a March Warden had charge of the Border area], murdered witnesses, extorted money from their enemies, and in one specific instance burned the house of one Hutcheon Hetherington to force him into the open so that they could cut him to pieces. Add to this blackmail, kidnapping, and ordinary reiving, and their account was a long one." A 150 heads of families were named as outlaws and in 1604 one hundred of these agreed to be deported with their families to The Netherlands to fight the Spanish. Most sneaked back to the western border within a year. More importantly to us, 150 Grahams were deported to Roscommon County, Ireland, arriving in Dublin in September, 1606.

County Roscommon in dark green

 Although some remained in central Ireland, many moved up to Ulster [Northern Ireland], in particular to County Fermanagh, itself a border county.

County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland

I believe that it was from this group that our Graham ancestors were descended, their families coming to Pennsylvania and New Jersey in the early 1700s, then migrating south to North Carolina and Tennessee.  Not all the Grahams were driven out of the Border, so it's always possible our Grahams came to America directly from southern Scotland or from English Cumberland. By the way, today in Cumbria (what Cumberland is now called) the name Graham is wide-spread.

And this raises another question. Are our southern Scottish Graham ancestors related by blood to the Highland Clan Graham?  According to Lloyd D. Graham, whose ancestors remained in Ireland, and who took numerous DNA tests in an attempt to connect Border Grahams with the Highland clan, the answer is a big yes. He wrote about his research in The Grahams of the 16-17th century Anglo-Scottish Border and their descendants in Rossadown, Co. Laois, Ireland. HERE

Clan Graham motto, "Never forget"

The history of the Graham Clan, founded by a Norman soldier, who arrived in Britain with William the Conqueror in 1066 is HERE

Graham Clan shield

 Sir William de Graham signed the foundation charter of Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh in 1128.

Holyrood Abbey

As a point of interest, here are the names of 74 families in surviving documents about the Border Reivers. If you know anyone by this name, you may be distantly related. The Grahams apparently found Armstrong women very attractive and vice versa:
Archbold, Armstrong (yes, Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon.)
Beattie, Bell, Burns
Carleton, Carlisle, Carnaby, Carrs, Carruthers, Chamberlain, Charlton, Charleton, Collingwood, Crisp, Croser, Crozier, Cuthbert
Dacre, Davison, Dixon, Dodd, Douglas, Dunne
Elliot
Fenwick, Forster
Graham, Gray
Hall, Hedley, Henderson, Heron, Hetherington, Hume
Irvine, Irving
Johnstone (Johnson) (You didn't think Lyndon was a Swede, did you?)
Kerr (we have Kerr ancestors, also, in the Raney tree)
Laidlaw, Little, Lowther
Maxwell, Milburn, Musgrove
Nixon (think of that dour face, Quaker or not), Noble
Ogle, Oliver
Potts, Pringle
Radcliffe, Reade, Ridley, Robson, Routledge, Rutherford
Salkeld, Scott, Selby, Shaftoe, Simpson, Storey
Tailor, Tait, Taylor, Trotter, Turnbull
Wake, Watson, Wilson, Woodrington
Yarrow, Young

We'll end with a Border Reiver ballad   HERE
And a 40 minute documentary on Border Reivers in the area where the Grahams lived (look at the lay of the land and listen to the accents) and their ballads HERE