Notes on the probable origin of the name Gemmill or Gemmell

38
My old aunt, Mrs. Janet Gemmill or Breckenridge,
told me the same story. These were anxious times,
and trade was greatly depressed. The country was
engaged in the Continental Wars, and my father informed
me that one of the Gemmills, after Raithmuir was sold,
entered the Army, and fell on the battlefield in Spain.
The other half of Raithmuir had sometime prior to 1657,
come to be possessed by a family named Stewart. My
father said the tradition was that one of our forefathers,
prior to that date, had a son and a daughter, and had left
the half of the farm to his son and the other half to his
daughter, and that she married a Mr. Stewart. I have
not been able at this distance of time to verify this, but
my father was quite certain that the Gemmills and the
Stewarts were related to each other, and that Raithmuir
was held by the two families on the old " runrigg "
system, that is, each owned rigg about. The pasture and
muir ground must have been common between them, but
with the ploughed lands, each possessed one rigg, the
other the next, and so on alternately over the whole farm.
It was a primitive system unsuited for modern farming,
and is now quite out of use. The Stewarts sold their half
of Raithmuir in 1787 to Wm. Boyd, of Berryhill who,
in 1 796, acquired the remainder from Alexander Anderson.
After the family sold Raithmuir, Thomas Gemmill's son,
XII. — Alexander Gemmill, my great-grandfather, became
tenant of the half of the farm of Ruschaw, in the immediate