Lost Gravestones

Earlier this year, I blogged about a new Canadian genealogy television series, Ancestors in the Attic and described the producer’s call for interesting family mysteries. I submitted a short essay about my fourth great grandfather Stoddart’s missing gravestones that sparked their interest.

I was contacted by the producers and I was thrilled to learn that they were attempting to determine more about the grave markers that were removed from my family’s small private cemetery in Brampton, Ontario. They planned to film their search for the lost Stoddart gravestones and include it in the first season of the series.

Unfortunately, they really didn’t discover anything new about the Stoddarts despite the fact that the film company and research team is based in the Toronto area and had access to the local archives. I suspect we will never learn what really happened to the family markers.

Yesterday, the producer emailed me:

Your segment about the “Lost Stoddart Gravestones” has been launched on our website. Go to:

http://www.history.ca/microsites/AncestorsInTheAttic

and click on VIDEO and then LOST GRAVESTONES.

It was felt that the challenge of resolving this question [of locating the missing grave stones] made the search less than perfect. However we still wanted to show the challenges and inherent dilemmas of genealogy — our compromise was to include the clip online.

I think that broadcasting the five minute segment on the web was a great solution and I am pleased that their efforts yielded something positive. I hope that my fellow Stoddart family researchers enjoy it as much as I did.

Unfortunately, the series will only be shown in Canada (starting this evening!) and there are no plans for it to be broadcast in the lower 48 states at this time.

Be of Stout Heart

Origins of the Stoddart Name

The surname, Stoddart (and its variants Stoddard, Stodart, Stodhard, Stothart, and Stothert), have both Scottish and Northumbrian origins. “The Scottish name of Stoddart is supposed to have been derived from the word Standard and has origins in Selkirkshire before 1600. Some historians have speculated that the name was originally Stout heart and was later anglified to Stothert. [1][2]

There is also evidence that the name had its beginnings in the Old English word stod, followed by herd or ward and that the original Stoddart was in charge of a stud of horses. [3]

However, the Dictionary of American Family Names questions this theory:

Stoddard
English (Northumbria): occupational name for a breeder or keeper of horses, from Old English stod, stud or stott ‘inferior kind of horse’ + hierde ‘herdsman’, ‘keeper’. There is a difficulty in deriving this name from Old English stod in that stud is not recorded in the sense ‘collection of horses bred by one person’ until the 17th century; before that it denoted a place where horses were kept for breeding, but that sense does not combine naturally with ‘herdsman.’[4]

It is interesting to note that the earliest mention of this surname in Scotland is in 1376 when David Stothirde, John Studehird, and William Studfirde are recorded as tenants of Douglas in barony of Buittle (RHM,1,p. 1x, 1xxi). [2] Another source places these same individuals in Dumfriessire in the 16th century. [3] I have theorized (but have no proof) that my third great grandfather, John Stoddart was born in Douglas in 1792. According to family lore, Stoddart’s wife, Margaret Lindsay, was the daughter of Margaret Douglas, who in turn, was the daughter if Lord John Douglas. Unfortunately, no one has been able to prove or disprove this story.

Today, this surname is found mostly in Glasgow and Edinburgh. [3] Margaret Stoddart, another descendant of John Stoddart by marriage and an insightful family historian, concluded that the most common spelling of name today was Stoddart. In her study of the John Stoddart family, she states that, in Canada, “Stoddart is not a common name. In the 1998 Toronto telephone directory it appears 51 times, in the Montreal directory 7 times, in the Vancouver directory 30 times, and in Victoria it appears 9 times. Winnipeg, Calgary and Edmonton together list the name 42 times.” She concludes that “in the western world there were probably no more than 3400 households bearing the name Stoddart in the 1990s.” [5]

The 1990 U.S. Census figures ranks the Stoddart surname as 19,949 most common! In 1850, the few Americans with the surname resided in Connecticut. By 1880, the most common place of residence of Stoddarts was New York. In 1920 most Stodddarts lived in Idaho, followed by Utah and Nevada, yet it has never been a common name in the United States. [6]

Sources:
[1] Scots-Irish: The Scot in North Britain, North Ireland and North America, Vol. 2.
[2] The Surnames of Scotland, pages 750-1
[3] David Dorward , Scottish Surnames, Mercat Press, 2003.
[4] Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4
[5] Margaret Stoddart, The John Stoddart Family 1790 – 1998, North Saanich, British Columbia, September 1998, Self-published manuscript.
[6] Hamrick Software Surname Distribution, http://hamrick.com/names/.