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Who are we?
George Black's book The Surnames of Scotland is the
authority on the origins of Scots surnames. Here's what he has
to say about who we are:
"COUBROUGH. A now not very common surname found in
Lanarkshire and Midlothian. It is a shortened form of MacCoubrey, q.v.
David Cowbratht witnessed testament of inventory of Catherine Lauder, 1515
(Swinton, p. xci). The name also occurs as Coulbrough and Cowbrough
in Stirling (1511, Cowbroch). Euphame Cubrughe in Badow, parish of Calder,
1669 (Campsie). William Cubrugh, a Perthshire heritor, 1688 (RPC.,
3. ser. XIII, p.332). John Couburgh in Balglairosh,
parish of St. Ninian's, and two more recorded there (Stirling).
"MACCOUBREY, MACCOUBRIE. G. Mac Cuithbreith 'son of
Cuthbert,' q.v. Henry McCowthry in Galloway, 1539 (RSS., II,
2967). The Isle of Man has Coobragh from MacGiolla Cobraght, 'son
of Cuthbert's servant.' The name of John Makopery, witness in Bute, 1513
(RMS., III, 1321), is perhaps another spelling."
Where did we start from?
Since at least 1650, the name seems to have been mostly in
the Stirling area of central Scotland. There were a few others in Perth,
Glasgow, Fife, and possibly South Leith, as early as 1579. The wide
variation
in spelling makes it difficult to be sure. This is especially true of
Scots records before civil registration began in 1855. Very few church
records gave the names of the bride's or groom's parents, unless one of
the happy couple happened to belong to local gentry, or happened to belong
to a churchman's family.
Most of the families I have tracked so far seem to have
lived in or around the parishes of Campsie, Falkirk, and Strathblane
before 1700. There may have been one family in Alloa parish, Clackmannan,
starting in about 1691. There seems to be no record of them there after
about 1725, but the name of the parish crops up again as the birthplace of
a Matthew Coubrough who went to Australia in about 1866, and his brother
William. Later, there were
branches in Killearn, Kilsyth, Balfron, and Buchlyvie parishes in the
county of Stirling, and in Eastwood, Neilston, and Renfrew
parishes of Renfrew, as well as Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Selkirk and
Galashiels parishes of Selkirk.
Where are we now?
I originally started tracing my own family line, in the
early 1970s, in an effort to figure out where I fit in the grand scheme of things. Many Coubroughs who grew up outside Scotland,
as I did, also
grew up believing that, outside of some vague, shadowy Scots ancestors, they were the only ones
with their surname. I and most of my cousins were raised with the belief that all
Canadians of our name were descendants of my great-grandparents, Mathew
and Elizabeth (Brown) Coubrough, thus, all directly related to each
other. I have since found that this is not quite true. There
are at least five separate Coubrough families here in Canada, plus at least one
Cowbrough line. Only one of them is connected to mine within the last five
generations, though some are connected to each other. (So far, these Coubrough and Cowbrough lines do not
include any whose Coubrough ancestor was a
woman because I haven't found them yet.)
With this discovery, it became obvious that we were not the only
Coubroughs in the world. Though most of the old records, especially the
Parish Records of Scotland, gave several spellings of the name, even within
the same family, there seemed to be two main spellings. Coubrough was the
most common, but there was also a large group that used Cowbrough.
This, coupled with the fact that even today the names is not all that
common, convinced me that all those bearing either version must be related
somewhere along the way.
After I had been searching on my own for some time, a
fortuitous Internet search on my surname brought me into contact with
John, a fourth-cousin- once-removed in Colorado, USA, who was also of the opinion
that we are all connected somewhere. He was able to supply a couple of
missing links to our own common ancestors, the earliest of whom was
born about 1750, probably in Campsie parish. With the help of a circa 1881
genealogy that had belonged to his aunt, we were on our way.
We are now a group of about 8 searchers who live in
Canada, the US, Scotland, Australia and New Zealand. We have sorted
out three main lines, though we still have a lot of
"strays." Two lines start before 1700 and run to
the present. The other one starts about 1750 and also runs to the present. We have linked
several living, breathing descendants to their ancestral lines, and to each
other, in places as diverse as Scotland (of course), Canada, Australia, the
United States of America, New Zealand, Uruguay, England, and South Africa.
Several hopeful souls are waiting for the next big connection discovery,
in case it might be theirs.
Why this page?
The purpose of this page is to publish what we find, and to
invite other descendants of the name to share their families' stories. If
your name is here, we all want to hear from you. If your family is not
here, we really want to hear from you. You are our best source of
information about your family. Please be assured that nothing is published without the
permission of the submitter, and then only names and family relationships
for living people. All members of this project are
volunteers. That is, we never
ask for money to support our cause. If you would like to
know more about our project, just click the e-mail link below to send me a
message.
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