Bairds of Auchmedden and Strichen, Aberdeenshire

THE BAIRDS OF AUCHMEDDEN AND
STRICHEN.
Exactly four hundred years ago — to be precise, on November 10,
1534 — a Fifeshire laird named Andrew Baird bought the estate of
Auchmedden, in the parish of Aberdour, from the Earl of Buchan. His
descendants held the estate for more than two centuries, down to 1750,
when it was absorbed by the omnivorous and much more vital Gordons.
A hundred years later, in 1854, it was purchased by Robert Baird
(1806-56), passing to his brother James (1802-76) — the fourth of the
eight famous brothers Baird of Gartsherrie, who had followed his
brother Robert into Aberdeenshire by buying the neighbouring estate
of Strichen in 1855. Auchmedden and Strichen then fell to James's
only son, the notorious George Alexander Baird ("Mr Abington,"
1861-93), the most racketty laird Aberdeenshire ever saw, who never
set foot on either of them after boyhood. His trustees held the estates
till 1925, when they were broken up for several purchasers.
On these two sets of transactions hangs a very instructive story,
which not only forms a useful subject for the consideration of the
Buchan Club, but which illustrates the interesting, though by no means
unique, process of two families, quite unconnected with each other, asv
far as is known, owning the same property. The Gartsherrie Bairds,
turning millionaires within half a century, and purchasing estates in
nine counties to the extent of £2,000,000, invaded Aberdeenshire, as
the rare, privately printed history of the family frankly acknowledges,
"less from considerations of a profitable investment than from the
desire to bring back into the possession of a Baird an estate which had
for so long a time been held by proprietors of that name."
While we are quite unable to prove a connection between the first
and the second Bairds of Auchmedden, it is very difficult to find the
exact origin of the earlier group, notwithstanding the fact that the
family had the good luck to possess a genealogist in the person of
William Baird (1701-1775), the last laird of his line, whose "Genea-
logical collections concerning the sirname of Baird and the families of