Memoirs of a Highland Lady - The Autobiography of Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus, Afterwards Mrs. Smith of Baltiboys, 1797-1830 #223776

I was born on the 7th of May 1797, of a Sunday evening, at No.6 (north Side) of Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, in my father's own lately built house, and I am the eldest of the five children he and my mother reared to maturity. My parents had married young; my father wanted a few weeks of twenty-two and my mother a' very few of twenty-one when they went together for better for worse. My poor mother! They were married on the 2nd of August 1796, in the church of the little village of houghton-le-spring, in the county of Durham. I have no genealogical tree of either family at hand, so not liking to trust to memory in particulars of this nature, I must be content with stating that my father was descended not very remotely from the Chief of the Clan Grant, and that these cadets of that great house having been provided for handsomely in the way of property, and having also been generally men of abilities in their rude times, had connected themselves well in marriage, and held rather a high position among the lesser barons of their wild country.