Ralph Scott

Ralph Scott is the oldest of his name the record reaches — and he stands at the family's beginning in more than one sense, for his country was not yet the flat levels of Howdenshire but Dunnington, a village just east of York. He was born there on the 26th of March 1713, one of the children of David Scott, a miller; his brothers and sisters were of Dunnington in those same years — Solomon, Jane, Ellin and Elizabeth baptised there, and the infant Mary buried there.

By his thirties he had come down the Ouse. On the 16th of November 1746 he married at Howden — the register naming them 'Ralph Scott of Blacktoft and Sarah Bradley of Howden' — and settled across the river at Blacktoft, where his children were christened: a first Ralph; an Elizabeth and a David baptised together in January 1750, the boy buried at two months; a second David in 1752; a Sarah; and in 1756 Solomon, the son who would be the parish's clerk and carry the line. Ralph himself was buried at Blacktoft on the 15th of December 1772.

Above him the line runs out. His father is named — David Scott, a miller of Dunnington — but only named: no baptism, no marriage, no wife stands behind him on the page. That is the Scott wall, and the page says so plainly. What it marks is a beginning as much as an end: the Scotts of this history started as a York-side milling family at Dunnington, moved to the Ouse-bank parishes of Blacktoft and Yokefleet, and only generations later worked their way up the levels into Cavil and Thorpe. Through Solomon, Ralph, George and Annie, that long drift down the river reaches the Drewerys and the Brocks.