In a role of voters taken about 1920, Findochty accounted for 182 fishermen householders, comprising 24 Campbells, 35 Smiths, 39 Sutherlands and 84 Fletts, (Black p.xxxii). Remarkable that only four names appear, but even more remarkable that the Fletts should make up almost half. How had this name come to be so dominant in a village established only slightly over 200 years earlier? Were they all originally from the same stock or were there different strands? Where had they come from? As a family historian, five of whose eight paternal great-grandparents were Findochty Fletts, I felt that perhaps the onus was on myself to find the answers. Local oral tradition asserted that the first bearers of the name came from Orkney at the behest of the local heritor, John Ord, Laird of Findochty, while local amateur historiography claimed migration from Shetland. The latter can easily be discounted as no Fletts appear in the records of these far northern Isles before 1749 some thirty years after their appearance in Findochty. The former story fails to explain why these immigrants were brought from such a long distance. If seamanship skills were required to expand the nascent fishing station at the Broadhythe of Findochty, then surely such skills would have been available from much nearer to home. Oral traditions, dependant on memory and verbal communication down through the ages tend to be true in the general but often distorted in the particular, in other words the details tend to lose their accuracy with age.

Two Flett families were established on the southern coast of the Moray Firth a full generation and nearly forty years before the name first appeared in Findochty. In 1682, James Flett, was a resident of Burghead in the parish of Duffus in Morayshire when he married Margaret Dunbar and settled down there. No earlier record of the names exists in the area and it therefore has to be concluded that James was an incomer. From later records the only place where substantial numbers bearing the Flett surname were established in the mid seventeenth-century was Orkney where the name appears in those islands' early sagas although none of the Orcadian Old Parish Registers takes us back far enough to make the link. It would seem, however, statistically very likely that James hailed from these northern isles and so this element of the oral tradition is probably generally true. James may not have arrived here alone, as another James Flett was recorded in a marriage contract with Christian Steven in 1688. There is no evidence to identify the relationship between the two men except that they were two individuals, and not the same person. They may have been cousins or simply associates as a later record suggests.

Three daughters, Janet, Catherine and Elspet were born to James and Margaret in the next five years and in 1689, John, their first son arrived, followed by a fourth daughter, Isabel in June 1692. In the months following the birth, Margaret's health deteriorated and she died early in August. With a young family it was no surprise that James should take a second wife, and as a fisherman, as likely he was, his need of a wife to collect bait, help with the lines and not least, to carry him dry to and from the boat, was an essential part of these early fishermen's daily life. The record of his marriage to Janet Scot has not so far been found, but a lawful daughter, Margaret, was born to them in 1699, and so we can be assured of their marriage. In 1702, Alexander was born but did not survive and James followed in the following year. In 1706, a second Alexander was born and seven years later, daughter Christian, their last child came along. One of the name witnesses at Christian's baptism was Christian Steven and so there may have been a relationship or a connection between her husband and James.

So, from James's children there were three sons, two full brothers and one half-brother, to carry on the name. John, the eldest, was first recorded as a witness in the baptism of his niece Janet Allan, his sister, Janet's daughter, in 1716. He may well have been married himself by then as in the following year he had a lawful daughter, Janet, by Elspet Prott in Burghead. In December of 1718, daughter Jean arrived. By comparing the Old Parish Register of Duffus with that of Rathven, the migration of certain families is easily detectable. Within the next year John and Elspet, his sister Janet and her husband moved to the fishing station at the Broadhythe of Findochty, established by the local laird, John Ord in 1716. The first reference to the name Flett in the Rathven Old Parish Register occurred on February 14th, 1720, when John Flett was named as a witness at the baptism of John, son to Hector McKenzie and Janet MacKay of the Broadhythe. In December of the same year, John Flett and his wife Elspet Prott had a son, also baptised and named John, and it is clear that the couple were then living in Findochty.

We can similarly trace the migration from Burghead of one John Prott and his wife Janet Watson. In 1723, a confrontation between John Prott's wife and a local inhabitant was reported in the Rathven Kirk Session Minutes in which it is clear that John is a skipper. So we have the appearance in the three year old fishing station quite suddenly of Skipper John Prott, John Allan and the three Flett brothers all arriving from the fishing community in Burghead to the Broadhythe. There seems to be only one reasonable explanation; these men and teenage boys represented a new boat's crew. Only one person would have been able to provide the necessary financial backing for such an enterprise, namely the Laird, John Ord, and so it seems this is the origin of the invitation by the heritor remembered in the oral tradition.

By 1727, the lands of Findochty had been sold to James, Earl of Findlater, and John Ord may no longer have been the financial provider for the Broadhythe by which time, the OSA reports, there were three boats in the community and there is a strong possibility that the 1719 migration was concerned with the commissioning of the second boat. A more tangible link appears in the baptismal record of John's first born in Findochty when the chief witness was a John Ord, either the laird himself, or one of his family.

In 1723, John had his daughter Anna baptised but there is no mention of Elspet, and just over a year later a marriage occurred between a John Flett and Margaret Sharp. I interpret these two events as meaning that Elspet had died in childbirth or shortly after and John subsequently remarried. Also witnessing Anna's baptism was brother James, who had not appeared previously in the records, and in October 1725, he again is named in a marriage contract with Margaret Cumming from Farskane, in Cullen parish. Three years later, in September 1728, we find Alexander named in a marriage contract with Anna McKenzie, possibly a member of one of the five McKenzie families then living in the Broadhythe. It seems reasonable to expect that James and Alex came from Morayshire with John or shortly afterwards to share in the new fishing enterprise. They would have been sixteen and thirteen in 1719, but still old enough to be part of the 5 or 6 man and boy crew of an early open-decked fishing boat.

The above scenario is based primarily on a personal but critical interpretation of the OPR records with due regard to the names of witnesses at the various baptismal events. Although impossible now to prove with absolute certainty, it can be said that all the evidence points in the same direction. For example, there is no proof that James Flett, the widower of Margaret Dunbar was also he who married Janet Scott, but if we interpret the records in any other way we have to explain three Fletts, all named James, arriving in Burghead, with one conveniently widowed before the other's marriage, and none of the children's names being the same. It is clear from the witnesses that these two Flett families were very close and the evidence strongly suggests that they had a common father. With the small populations involved in the last decades of the seventeenth-century, the individuality of any of the above named can, to high degree of accuracy, be accepted. No figures for Burghead are currently to hand, but an indication of the size of village population being considered, can be appreciated from considering Findochty itself. It had only three boats to support its population in 1727 and by 1793, the number had risen to 12 vessels. Those 12 boats supported a population of 162 living in 45 houses and so we could expect the number of people supported by the three boats in 1726 to be approximately 40. My own research into the early settlers in the village suggests a population of about 42 in 1721*.

In conclusion it seems that the oral tradition has generally been born out...the original James Flett seems more likely to have hailed from Orkney than anywhere else way back around 1680 but the journey to Findochty was not direct. By step migration, as the social geographers term it, the journey was via Burghead and who knows perhaps Caithness before that. The element concerning the local heritor seems plausible when we appreciate the number of fishermen who migrated to Findochty from Duffus parish and the probable reason for the move in which John Ord must have been involved. The marriages of the three Flett brothers produced between them twenty-five children, of whom ten were males, most of whom survived to propagate the name. With such a start, no other name was likely to overtake the proliferation of the Fletts in Findochty.

Sources:
Duffus Old Parish Register.
Rathven Old Parish Register.
The Rathven Kirk Session Minutes.
The Old Statistical Account of Scotland, (OSA).
Wm. Cramond, The Church and Churchyard of Rathven, (1885).
T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People, (1989).
G. F. Black, The Surnames of Scotland, (1993).
G. Hutcheson, Days of Yore, (1887).
Seton & Bonar, Buckie and Area Past and Present, (1987).

* See the Earliest Findochty Families from our Community History page