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The Lothians
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mother, thought her father was born in Glasgow.

Over the past ten years, I have been accumulating dates of births, marriages and deaths of the William Lothian family, and checking historical references and geneological works. Burkes Peerage indicates that the only Earl or Marquess of Lothian who would qualify as the progenitor of our family was William Kerr, the 6th Marquess, who was born on October 4, 1763. The 6th Marquess was married twice, the first time on April 14, 1793, to Henrietta, formerly the wife of the 1st Earl of Belmore, and daughter of the 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire. She had three children the first of whom, John William Robert, became the 7th Marquess on the death of his father on April 27, 1824. Henrietta died in 1805, and the Marquess married on December 1, 1806, Harriet, the daughter of the 3rd Earl of Buccleuch. Harriet had three children by the Marquess and outlived him by nine years. As George Lothian was born in 1810, and my father, William in 1814, the legend of the morganatic marriage of Helen Johnstone to the 6th Marquess does not fit. Moreover, it seems very unlikely that Helen would become enamoured of a married man 20 years her senior.

John William Robert Kerr, the 7th Marquess, was born February 1, 1794, or eleven years after Helen Johnstone. lit seems doubtful that he was the father of George or William Lothian, as he would have been married at 15. Burkes Peerage gives the date of his marriage as July, 1831, and the date of his first born as August, 1832.

It has been suggested that our family might be descendants of the Roseberys, a family with long and wealthy traditions in Scotland. The 4th Earl of Rosebery was born on October 14, 1783, the same year as Helen Johnstone. He married his first wife, Harriet Bouverie in 1808, and after this marriage was dissolved in 1815, he remarried in 1819 Ann Margaret, daughter of the 1st Viscount Anson. However, the Earl of Roseberys family name was Primrose, and that does not fit the Lothian legend.

The family of the Duke of Roxburghe originally descended from the Kerrs of Cessford, but this branch of the family spelled their name Ker. The Ker lineage disappeared when Sir William Drummond became the 2nd Earl and he assumed the name of Ker. Sir James Innes, the 5th Duke of Roxburghe, who was born in 1736 and died in 1820, assumed the name of InnesKer in 1807. I consider him to be a very unlikely ancestor, as he was 47 years of age when Helen Johnstone was born.

In one of his letters to me about the family geneology, cousin W. George Lothian related that Grandfather William had confided in him one day that the family crest was a bugle horn and that the family motto was Non dormit, qui custoditt, or in English, Let not him who guards sleep. The Fourth. Edition of Fairbairns Book of Crests of the Families of Great Britain and Ireland, indeed shows the crest of the Lothians of Edinburgh and Overgager, Scotland, as a bugle horn garnished or stringed. The motto also is as given above. The bugle horn however, is shared as a crest with 52 other families, although the Lothian motto that goes with it is distinct. The family crest of the Kerrs (Marquess of Lothian) is The sun in splendour and the motto, late but in earnest.

My cousin, Mrs. Frances Lothian Keeth of Leawood, Kansas, has done intensive research not only on the Lothians, but also on the side of her grandmother, Susannah Hudson. Some information about the Lothians is contained in the New Harlem Register, compiled