Was Adam Smith actually born in Strathenry?

Shortly before he died Adam Smith instructed two close friends, James Hutton and Joseph Black, to burn his papers – private correspondence, manuscripts, the lot: it all went up in flames. For those interested in Adam Smith, this is tantalizing - every surviving scrap of information about his life is precious. Who knows what treasures were burned to ash that day!

Happily, despite this destruction, we do actually know a surprising amount about the great man, but evidence for one rather basic fact is missing – where he was born.

The answer might seem obvious: his home town of Kirkcaldy. Parish records there tell us that he was baptized in the town’s Old Kirk on 5 June 1723.

At the other end of his existence, we have his death record in Edinburgh, in 1790, from the Canongate Parish Register:

So we know where he was baptized, and we know where he died. But there is no formal record of this sort relating to his actual birth, leaving open the question of where this actually took place.

What about Starthenry?

There’s a frequently repeated assertion that he wasn't born in Kirkcaldy at all, but nine miles away in Strathenry, at the home of his maternal grandfather Robert Douglas. There is certainly a connection with Strathenry: when Smith was a small child, he was abducted from there by a travelling group — an episode recorded by his biographer John Rae.

Could Adam Smith, in fact, have been born at Strathenry and then brought to Kirkcaldy for baptism? His mother, Margaret Douglas, had been widowed only a few months before Smith’s birth: although both her parents had passed away, perhaps her family had insisted she return to the house to be cared for until the child was born?

While we should keep in mind that no records have been produced to substantiate this claim, it is certainly an intriguing thought. For such an important figure, and a man so intrinsically linked with the town of Kirkcaldy, this is a pretty critical piece of information – and I’ve been on a quest to get to the bottom of this.

In the 18^th century, parish records are the key source of formal information on births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and so on, but Kirkcaldy’s records are incomplete at this time. So when there are no parish or Kirk records, it may seem as though the trail is cold – but given Smith’s fame as one of the leading Enlightenment philosophers, there is a good deal of correspondence from contemporaries still preserved; and although he arranged for his own papers to be destroyed, many letters that he sent to others still exist to this day.

And it was among this wealth of ‘third party’ material that I finally made a connection.

While Adam Smith was living in Kirkcaldy, busily writing The Wealth of Nations, he received a visit from an old student, a man named David Callander. The two spent a pleasant day together, where among other things Smith told him that he liked to bathe in the Forth, both summer and winter!

The lost letter

Callander wrote about his visit to his brother John, describing the events of the day. This letter no longer exists – however, deep within the archives of Edinburgh University, you will find the Laing Collection. Within this set of correspondence, there is a document written by John Callander, which summarises the content of that letter. And in one part of that note, we find this passage, where John writes that his brother wrote to him that Adam Smith was “a posthumous child…educated at Kirkcaldy, where his father was Collector of Customs, & where he was born, Ad. Smith having once shown him the house wherein he drew his first breath”.

So there we have it - contemporary testimony that Adam Smith himself identified Kirkcaldy, not Strathenry, as the town of his birth.

....where he was born?

Do we know the precise house? No - and that may be something which can never be established with absolute certainty, although another biographer, Ian Simpson Ross, states that “local tradition” had it that the house was a tenement at the corner of Rose Street, and the High Street. On his father’s inventory after death, we can tell that his house consisted of a dining room, a west room with a little back room, an east room, and a kitchen – a common layout for a town tenement.So while the precise address may remain one of those tantalising little gaps in the historical record, the actual evidence we now have is rather better than local tradition, family association, or a good story: it is the testimony of David Callendar, describing a pleasant day in the company of the great man, who personally took him to see the house where he was born.

In Kirkcaldy!

by Martin Cotter