Joseph Robertson - Encyclopedia

GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES

JOSEPH ROBERTSON (1810-1866), Scottish antiquary, was born at Aberdeen on the 17th of May 1810, the son of a small shopkeeper. He was educated in Marischal College in Aberdeen and was for some years engaged in literary and newspaper work there and in Glasgow and Edinburgh. In 1839 he helped to found the Spalding Club, organized to publish the historical, genealogical, topographical and literary remains of the north-eastern counties of Scotland, and he edited eight of its thirty-eight volumes. In 1853 he was appointed curator of the historical and antiquarian department of the General Register House, Edinburgh, hitherto a subordinate and unimportant office, but which, in his hands, became of the first consequence to the interests of antiquarian literature in Scotland. His inventory of the personal property and jewels of Mary Queen of Scots, prefaced by a paper of great learning and research, and his essays on Scottish architecture, preceded his greatest work, published by the Bannatyne Club (1866), Concilia Scotiae, Ecclesiae Scoticanae Statuta. In 1864 the University. of Edinburgh conferred upon him the honorary degree of LL.D. He died on the 13th of December 1866.