JOSEPH

See also:

• ROBERTSON, FREDERICK WILLIAM (1816-1853)
• ROBERTSON, GEORGE CROOM (1842-1892)
• JOSEPH ROBERTSON (1810-1866)
• ROBERTSON, THOMAS WILLIAM (1829-1871)
• ROBERTSON, WILLIAM BRUCE (182o-1886)

ROBERTSON (1810-1866)  , Scottish antiquary, was born at Aberdeen on the 17th of May 181o, the son of a small shopkeeper . He was educated in Marischal College in Aberdeen and was for some years engaged in literary and news-paper work there and in Glasgow and Edinburgh . In 1839 he helped to found the Spalding Club, organized to publish the historical, genealogical, topographical and literary remains of the north-eastern counties of Scotland, and he edited eight of its thirty-eight volumes . In 1853 he was appointed curator of the historical and antiquarian department of the General Register House, Edinburgh, hitherto a subordinate and unimportant office, but which, in his hands, became of the first consequence to the interests of antiquarian literature in Scotland . His inventory of the personal property and jewels of Mary Queen of Scots, prefaced by a paper of great learning and research, and his essays on Scottish architecture, preceded his greatest work, published by the Bannatyne Club (1866), Concilia Scotiae, Ecclesiae Scoticanae Statuta . In 1864 the University of Edinburgh conferred upon him the honorary degree of LL.D . He died on the 13th of December 1866 .