| Custodial History | William Smith was the son of the Reverend W. Smith of Chapel of Garioch, and lived in Union Street, Aberdeen. |
| Source | Presented by Alexander Dingwall Fordyce (1810-1900), merchant in Canada, to the New Spalding Club in 1889 and by them to the library in 1907.
Alexander Dingwall Fordyce was born in Aberdeen, the son of a merchant, and graduated AM from Marischal College, Aberdeen in 1833. He became a merchant himself in Canada, but also took a keen interest in genealogy and the history of Aberdeen. He was not a member of the New Spalding Club but supported their work and contributed texts to their collection from his own library. He died around 1900.
The original Spalding Club, an antiquarian publishing society, was named after John Spalding (1609-1670), an Aberdonian lawyer and historian of the seventeenth century, and founded in Aberdeen in 1839. It was refounded as the New Spalding Club in 1886, and again refounded in the twentieth century as the Third Spalding Club, but its original purpose remains the same. |