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A Moderate Tree

by Ecclegen · May 11, 2016

A further tree has been added recently: the Carstairs Hill Tree. This contains the names of about 200 ministers, but only five of these were Free Church men. The reason for that is that this is a tree of mainly moderate ministers. It shows the interconnectedness of the leading Moderate ministerial families in the 18th century and the influence that they had not least in the Universities – especially in St Andrews, Fife.

An existing tree has also been substantially revised, namely, the Bayne Tree. If you looked at this tree before, it would be worth looking at it again. It has been developed beyond all recognition – it now contains the names of 187 ministers, 35 of them being Free Church men.

Someone in the new Carstairs Hill Tree is connected with someone in the already existing Bell Tree – the first tree done: an experimental, stand-alone tree. This means that each tree on this site is now related to another one, so that there is no free-standing, independent tree.

There are now close to a thousand ministers mentioned in these trees, over 200 of them being Free Church ministers.

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This page was last updated on: May 12, 2016 @ 9:12 am

Development

This web-site started out life as a means of supplementing the information that is provided by Ewing’s Annals of the Free Church of Scotland, 1843-1900.

A small gap has been filled in recently in regard to the later life of those Free Church ministers who went into the Union of 1900 and became ministers of the United Free Church. Formerly I gave no details of their ministry thereafter but simply gave a page number in Lamb’s Fasti of the United Free Church (FUFC) where that information could be found. Now I have given the places and dates of ministry of these ministers in the United Free Church with the corresponding reference in the FUFC. This will especially be of use to those who don’t have immediate access to that reference book. As I say, a small gap has been filled.

But the filling of one gap only reveals others. Some Free Church ministers survived to see the Union of 1929 – the Union of the majority of the United Free Church with the Church of Scotland. In regard to their ministries, the gap has now been moved from 1900 to 1929: what happened to them after the Union of 1929? A little work needs to be done to fill in that gap.

Moreover, the original aim was to supply biographical details of all ministers who served in the Free Church between 1843 and 1900. I depended on the Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae (FES) to supply details of the lives of Free Church ministers who had served at any time in the Church of Scotland; and I depended on the FUFC to supply the details of the Free Church ministers who had become minister of the United Free Church. However, it has become apparent that Lamb has not in fact supplied the biographical details of all these men. There are around 300 ministers for whom such details are missing, and efforts will now be made to fill in that gap too, as time permits.