GALBRAITH,
a surname derived from two Gaelic words, ‘Gall Bhreatan,’ strange
Britain, or Low country Briton. Nisbet renders the meaning ‘the brave
stranger,’ but the former appears the more correct. The Galbraiths were
once a powerful family in the Lennox. The first known is Gillespick
Galbrait, witness in a charter by Malduin, earl of Lennox, to Humphry
Kilpatrick, of the lands of Colquhoun. In the beginning of the reign of
Alexander the Second, the same Earl Malduin gave a charter to Maurice,
son of this Gilespick, of the lands of Gartonbenach, in Stirlingshire,
and soon after, in 1238, the same lands, under the name of Bathernock,
(now Baldernock,) were conveyed to Arthur Galbraith, son of Maurice,
with power to seize and condemn malefactors, on condition that the
culprits should be hanged on the earl’s gallows. From the Galbraiths of
Bathernock, chiefs of the name, descended the Galbraiths of Culeruich,
Greenock, Killearn, and Balgair. In the Ragman Roll occurs the name of
Arthur de Galbrait, as one of the barons of Scotland who swore fealty to
Edward the First in 1296. The family were afterwards designed of
Gartconnell.
William
Galbraith of Gartconnell is noticed as a person “of good account” in the
time of David the Second, about the middle of the 14th
century. [Crawford’s Peerage, p. 159, note.] This William had
three daughters, coheiresses, the eldest of whom married John de
Hamilton, a son of the house of Cadzow, predecessor of the Hamiltons of
Baldernock and Bardowie, who in consequence adopted in their arms a
boar’s head, part of the arms of Galbraith; the second, Janet, married,
in 1373, in the reign of Robert the Third, Nicol Douglas, fourth son of
James first lord of Dalkeith, grandson of William lord of Douglas, the
companion in arms of Sir William Wallace; by which marriage he acquired
the estate of Mains and other lands in the Lennox, still in the
possession of his descendant. The third daughter became the wife of the
brother of Logan of Restalrig, from whom descended the Logans of
Gartconnell and Balvey, long since extinct. In the reign of James the
Second, one of the name of Galbraith was governor of the upper castle of
Dumbarton.
The family of
Galbraith of Machrihanish and Drumore in Argyleshire, of which David
Steuart Galbraith, Esq., is the representative (1854), is sprung from
the Galbraiths of Gigha, descended from the Galbraiths of Baldernock.
They fled from the Lennox with Lord James Stewart, youngest son of
Murdoch, duke of Albany, after leaving Dumbarton, in the reign of James
the First, and held the island of Gigha from the Macdonalds of the Isles
till after 1590. The Galbraiths, in the Gaelic language, are called
Breatanuich or Clann-a-Breatannuich, ‘Britons, or the children of the
Britons.’
