Scottish Obsession

One might think from my genealogy reading that I am mostly Scottish, lately. I have become obsessed with early Scottish history, trying to work out the family history around the early Bog family, in the Berwickshire area, and trying to get enough contextual background to decide whether any of our Clark/ Clarke/ Clerke family are Scottish. Actually, so far, only the Bogue line is Scottish, and the rest come from among the landed gentry of Cambridgeshire, Devon, Kent, Wales, etc. Many were apparently royalists who chose to leave for America when the Parliamentarians took over in England after the civil war in the 1600's. Some were related to King Henry, or otherwise blood-relatives of royalty, and in several lines the earliest families are associated with castles or manors.

Right now, I am going through old documents available online, looking for records that mention the name Bog and the placename Burnehouse/Burnhouse. At this stage I am not sure I would do any better if I was in Edinburgh or Glasgow looking for information. Actually, I might do alright in the records collections in Edinburgh, but only if I had an idea what I am looking for. I am right now still learning my basic geography. I was in the Morgan library today looking for more books, and while I found a huge one on Devon, I am going to be using the Web to get a sense of place, because there are no clear basic maps in the whole book to orient a non-British reader. This one at least mentions something about the border regions of Devon, but for an American reader, it is not at all easy to keep straight where all the shires and regions are within Great Britain. I also found, but did not check out, a book on the Cumbrians, and several on Galloway; they were all devoid of contextual maps, and actually from my reading so far it is a fair question what each author assumes to be Galloway or Cumbria, especially before the 16th century.

My online explorations have yielded a few interesting things. I did finally find the Bog coat of arms, and a heraldic crest list that lists the Bogs of Burnehouses separate from the Bog family, so that I am more sure this is the one I want. I found a few records as well that mention the various Bog names I know (John, James, Alexander) and among names I am also familiar with by now as the right community for the people I am hunting. Amusingly enough, once again my friend's surname, Kemp, turned up as well, as another burgess in Edinburgh. Actually most of the Kemp families I have run across were associated with the Clarks and the Barringers in Ontario and New York, though, not the Bogues. The social glue that draw and binds the landed gentry class together may have made my parents more compatible. Perhaps it also makes those families' offspring more likely to wind up in graduate school, but I doubt it.