About the Research project

How the project got under way

In the Summer of 1999 Steve Grant, who was to build the UK Clan Grant Society's first website, floated the idea, which he had heard from his grandfather, that the Grant chiefs did not come from France, but rather were of Norse origin. He had some very wacky ideas as to how this might have come about and how that might be reflected in Clan Grant culture. In one of his more imaginative moods he even proposed that the clan crest - the "mountain aflame proper" could even be symbolic of a volcano and suggestive, therefore, of an Icelandic background!

There were two significant responses to the challenge he laid down. On the one hand I picked at his argument and suggested that it was also necessary to show the errors in the commonly accepted theory as well as putting together a plausible hypothesis of his own. But perhaps more importantly Phil Moody in the USA brought to his attention what Steve then dubbed the "Cromdale Text" - the history of the Grants as written by Rev. James Chapman (the Minister at Cromdale in Strathspey) in 1729, published in MacFarlane's Genealogical Collections, reissued by the Scottish Historical Society in 1900 under the editorship of James Toshack Clark.

Using his Web contacts, Steve soon discovered that the Sister churches in Gran, Norway, to which Chapman made reference did actually exist. No one in the Clan Grant society seemed to be aware of the text and certainly no member was aware of the sister churches, so Steve quite rightly trumpeted the "rediscovery" of the text and the existence of the churches both on his web pages, which soon became the basis of the Clan Society's site and through the pages of Standfast..

Our Chief was so delighted with what had been found that at the Clan Society dinner in York in late 1999 he incensed member Peter Grant with the forthrightness of his dismissal of the Norman origin proposition.

There were, however, serious difficulties with Chapman's story, not least that for some of the generations to work, each man would have needed to father his son at the age of 80! So I proposed to Steve that we should examine all Chapman's claims in detail to see what could stand up and what could not. This led to a serious flurry of email in which Steve took an increasingly back seat. Many letters were written, firstly to Clan Chiefs and Clan Societies, then to academics. Many books were ordered and read. Discussion raged in immensely nit-picking detail while we decided what was possible and what was not.

By April 2000 Peter's correspondence with 'Standfast' Editor Don Grant had got him enmeshed in the project. His efforts over many months to defend the Norman position were invaluable as they prompted the closest possible examination and its eventual dismissal with even greater confidence. By June we desperately needed someone based in Edinburgh and Canadian émigré David Grant was prevailed upon. As a PhD student and university lecturer he was especially valuable also in commenting on the extent to which any of our propositions might meet the standards of academic rigour. (We still have a way to go here!)

Since then the project has snowballed - going far beyond what we expected and leading us to conclusions we could never have imagined as can be seen not only from these pages, but also from the ebooks which will be available as and when we can arrange it. The value of synergy cannot be underestimated as the often strongly put arguments weeded out the untenable propositions, making up for what would otherwise have been the weaknesses in any one person's thinking - and in this, as with the range of access to expertise we have enjoyed, we have had an advantage previous scholars could not even have dreamed of. We can only hope that you, the surfer, will see it that way!.

Throughout this process, I have tried to keep the Society up to date through regular articles in Standfast (some now reproduced also in An Dul, the Canadian Society magazine).

ACG