Sir William Fraser

Sir William Fraser, (February 18, 1816 - March 13, 1898) was a solicitor and connoisseur of ancient Scottish history, paleography and genealogy. The Fraser family came from farmers and artisans in Mearns. He was born the eldest of two sons and daughter of James Fraser (1786 - 1834), a bricklayer and his wife Anne (died 1821), daughter of James Walker, tenant of Elfhill's farm from Fetresso, about 5 miles from Stonehaven. The couple settled and were fencers in Arduti's Exile. William Fraser was initially educated at a private school in Stonehaven, led by Rev. Charles Michie, a graduate of the Marischal College in Aberdeen in 1810, who taught his whole life. On August 23, 1830, Fraser began a five-year training course with attorneys Brand and Burnett, attorneys in Stonehaven. In December 1835, he went to Edinburgh, where he joined the firm Hill and Todd, writers to the seal of Her Majesty. He continued his education at the University of Edinburgh in the field of Scottish law and transport. In 1838, he attended classes in French. He was lucky that he subsequently took up various matters requiring antique and, in particular, genealogical studies, and thus he got acquainted early with those studies in which he became such an expert, and steadily accumulated a considerable amount of knowledge that made possible his great series of fifty or so volumes of history from twenty to thirty leading noble and land families in Scotland. Sir William Fraser died three months after his sister Ann, who had kept a home for him since 1846. They share a very unusual and richly decorated grave designed by architect Arthur Forman Balfour Paul at the Dinov Cemetery in Edinburgh south of the northernmost path in the northern part of the original cemetery.