Will the real Carngoddy make itself known?
Sometimes the curse of the genealogist, sometimes the blessing, transcriptions of historical records are central to our work. Turning a document into machine readable text means that records can be indexed, searched, sorted and, in theory, easily read.
Carngoddy, near Fort Augustus in Scotland is probably a place that very few have heard of. You’ll struggle to find it on any maps – I’ve not found it marked. But it’s dear to me as it’s where my Great Grandfather lived at one point in his early life and it became became a personal mission to find out more about it and try and pinpoint it.
As these locations and therefore families are in Scotland one is only going to find transcriptions of historical documents on the popular resources like Ancestry and Find My Past. The originals will be on Scotland’s People and therefore attract an additional fee. It’s not a problem paying, but one does want to spend money on the correct records, so time is usually taken beforehand on Ancestry and Find My Past searching through transcribed records. So if the transcription is wrong then wider internet searches turn up zero. Such as it was with Carngoddy.
I found the place transcribed as:
- Camgoddy – ok, an ‘r’ next to an ‘n’ could be seen as an ‘m’
- Camgodgy – how the second ‘d’ became a ‘g’ is hard to understand when one has seen the original
- Carngadoly – they got the ‘Carn’ bit right but saw an ‘a’ instead of an ‘o’ and split the ‘d’ in two
One website I found showed the results of a study by one Prof. Harry W. Duckworth, a Canadian, who had spent a lot of time researching variant spellings of places in this very area. Prof. Duckworth had the following variations for Carngoddy:
- Carnnagoddie
- Carnghoady
- Carnaboddy
- Carnghaddy
- Carngodie
The original page is at electricscotland.com/canada/fraser/boleskine.htm
So I went through many a search finding nothing until I started to make my own variations and got a few results with Carngoddy. Once I had the digital copies of the original documents, especially the Censuses, I could confirm my hypothesis of the correct spelling.
There isn’t much out there on the internet but a few newspaper references were found regarding the sale of farm leases where Carngoddy is mentioned. I also found a transcription of 17th Century Presbytery Records that accused all who lived there of being Papists! An image of this record is at the top of this page.
As a corollary to the down side I recently found a word that I could not decipher on the original but was correct on the transcription – ‘mantua’ – which, so I subsequently learned, is a style of dress.
And that’s the difficultly with transcribing; if you know the word itself you can usually read the handwriting by using your ‘mental dictionary’ but if the word is unknown to you then you have no reference.