| Custodial History | Original provenance unclear. 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. |
| Copyright | Subject to the condition of the original, copies may be supplied for private research use only on receipt of a signed undertaking to comply with current copyright legislation. Permission to make any published use of material from the collection must be sought in advance from the University Archivist and, where appropriate, from the copyright owner. Where possible, assistance will be given in identifying copyright owners, but responsibility for ensuring copyright clearance rests with the user of the material. |