The ancestral home of our Corston clan, a rooming house, seeingly belonging to a William Corston, Kirkwall, Orkney, circa, 1814.

The Orcadian Scots

Niven Sinclair based upon research by Nicholas Cram-Sinclair Drawing on the available historical research sources such as Craven, Peterkin’s Rentals, J Cloustan’s “Records of the Earldom of Orkney” and Roland William St. Clair’s “The St. Clairs of the Isles”.(Native Families of the Orkney and Shetland Islands.http://my-bolt-family.co.uk/shet3.html Date accessed: 18 January 2008.)

The native families of the Orkney are the descendants of the initial Norse Viking colonists. The majority of these families have taken their names from their main place of residence or land-ownership within the Northern Territories of either the Orkney or Shetland islands. They can be separated them into two main groups.

The first group is that of the senior native families whose ancestors were the significant landholding nobility of either the Orcadian or Shetlander ruling assemblies or councils (known as ‘lawthing’) and were regularly mentioned in the old records as either ‘gudmen’ (hereditary gentlemen odallers), ‘lawrightmen’ or ‘lawrikmen’ (regular parish district assizemen), ‘lendirmen’ (landed men) and ‘roitmen’ (hereditary odaller/council men).

The second group were made up of the lessernative families of putative Norse Viking origin whose profile became slightly more prominent after the 1470/71 cession of the islands to the Scottish Crown and the subsequent tyrannicaeriod under the Stewart Earls of Orkney. This larger group included the Corston family