Fife sisters discovered castle connection in battered suitcase containing 5 centuries of family secrets

An old brown suitcase has been passed down through generations of Helena Benlakehal and Janet Jarvie’s family.

Rarely has anyone looked at the documents it contains or tried to decipher them.

Until now.

The suitcase is full of contracts, wills, death certificates and land transactions going back hundreds of years through the Gateside family history.

Some of the records are so old they are written on vellum, a parchment made from animal skin.

And some are penned in an intricate historic script – known as secretary hand – like that used by William Shakespeare.

Is Gateside family history linked to aristocracy?

Intriguingly, they suggest family links with two seats of aristocracy, Balvaird Castle and Scone Palace.

Eager to unravel and preserve their family history before it is too late, Helena and Janet, who now live in Fife, enlisted the help of Kinross family historian Sarah Smith.

Sarah, who runs geneaology service Unlock Your Past, has spent a year poring over the documents and conducting research.

And she still has work to do to unlock the full story.

Sarah says it is “very rare” to find such a trove of old documents in a family’s possession.

“Usually you find these in the National Records of Scotland,” she says.

Before it came into the sisters’ hands, the suitcase was kept in what was their grandparents’ home, Summerfield, near Gateside, in Perthshire.

Helena, 69, explains: “We have had the suitcase in our family for a couple of hundred years.

“My grandparents’ family house was at Summerfield but they died in the early 1950s.”

The suitcase was rarely, rarely touched

The records show that Summerfield, where generations of the family had lived, was sold around this time. Helena and Janet’s parents lived in Auchtermuchty.

“Our dad – Robert Skinner – then had the suitcase and one or two artefacts from Summerfield and then he and our mum got married in 1955.

“The suitcase has just always been with us.

“We rarely, rarely looked into it and it was rarely, rarely touched.

“It was just kept in a cupboard.”

When she was in her 20s, Janet, 68, tried to learn about its contents.

But she says: “I found a death certificate with the name Janet Skinner on it. That was my name and I thought I’ll not bother looking at that anymore!

“I didn’t understand a lot of it anyway. I knew it was to do with land deeds, money for land, payments for rent and things like that.

“But I didn’t know where everything tied together.

“A lot of it is written in old secretary style which is almost like a different language.

Ensuring Gateside family history is not lost forever

“I took it to the museum in Kirkcaldy to see if anyone could help and they advised me to go to Edinburgh but I just never got around to it.”

So the suitcase lay for several more decades, kept safe but all but forgotten.

But as the sisters got older, they knew they would need to open it again and attempt to tease out its secrets or risk it being lost forever.

Helena, who married an Algerian and lived in Algeria for many years,  said: “Janet has no children. My three children are more interested in north African history and Arabic history, not what’s in this case.

“Our dad and his dad and his grandad have kept that safe for all these years.

“We’ve been responsible for it for so long and out of respect for our parents, what do we do with it?”

Janet says: “If it was just left, when we go where would it go?”

Sarah was recommended to them by a relative who had traced her family tree. And around a year ago the genealogist got to work.

She has been trained to read secretary hand and says the documents are fascinating but take a long time to decipher.

Dad’s tales of owning a castle

“We’ve got some very recent documents from the 19th Century, mostly business accounts.

“But some of them are from the 1500s.”

There’s a will of a Miss Jean Murray from 1854.

From 1789 there’s a precept of clare constat in favour of a William Murray. Clare constat is a Latin term used in Scots law meaning “it clearly appears.” Such a legal document granted land to the rightful heir of a deceased person.

There’s an 1807 instrument of sasine, recording the seizure of land.

And the documents and research Sarah has conducted bear up stories their father used to tell Helena and Janet as children about Balvaird Castle, which is right beside Summerfield.

Janet says: “Everytime we drove back from Perth, Dad would say that castle was in our family.

“And we as children would be like ‘we used to own a castle?’!

“It’s something Dad would always talk about but he never went into any sort of detail about it.”

And indeed the documents bear out the link between both Balvaird Castle and Scone Place.

Sarah points to a document bearing the name Viscount Stormont.

Scone Palace passed into the hands of Sir David Murray in the 1600s, who was made Viscount Stormont soon after.

When he died childless, the palace went to another branch of the family and the Murrays of Balvaird Castle moved in.

Today, the palace remains in the ownership of the Murray family.

Helena and Janet’s great-great grandmother was Janet Murray, daughter of William Murray of Foresterseat.

She married James Skinner in 1840.

Stories of the Skinner family tree

Helena says: “We want to know if that Janet Murray is a cousin of the Murrays at Scone Palace because we have all these Murray documents.

“Is there a connection?”

Sarah says: “I think there is a distant connection. Also the names [in the Skinner family tree] are all very similar, like Andrew, William, James.”

She has drawn the Skinner family tree and created a book telling the family story. But she continues to look into the connection between the Skinners and the Murrays of Scone.

The sisters have also been intrigued by other tales uncovered. Like the fact their grandfather died in the same Auchtermuchty house that Janet was born in.

A nephew of their great-great grandfather was a minister, the Rev James Skinner, whose memoir, Autobiography of a Metaphysician, was published posthumously in 1893.

Once Sarah finishes her research, Helena and Janet plan to hand the suitcase and its contents over to Perth and Kinross Council archives at AK Bell Library.

Helena says: “We need to place it in the care of someone who understands it and will be able to look after it.

“Hopefully they can do more research and maybe use it to help piece other bits of history together.”