Update on the Scotland and the Flemish People Project

Amy Eberlin
Thursday 24 September 2015

We welcome our blog readers back for the new university semester with a brief update on the status of the Scotland and the Flemish People Project.

Concluding Conference

The planning for the international conference—that will take place on Thursday, June 16th and Friday, June 17th, 2016 in St Andrews—is well underway.  The search for sponsorship of the event has now been completed.  We are grateful to the Government of Flanders, the P F Charitable Trust and the Wyfold Charitable Trust for their generosity in supporting the conference.

As noted in our blog dated May 15th the conference will be open to the general public. It will be of interest to academic and local historians, family historians, genealogists, and genetic genealogists.  There will be two tracks within the conference so that participants will be able to choose the sessions they want to attend.

A website that will handle registration for the conference is under construction at present and we will notify all readers of our newsletter and blog as soon as it is goes live.  An organizer for the conference will shortly be appointed and announced.

Some key speakers have already been identified but there is still time for readers of this blog posting to suggest topics that might usefully be addressed.  Please let Alex Fleming ([email protected]) know if you have ideas you would like to share with us.

The Fleming Family Charter Collection

As noted in our blog dated March 13th, Mr. Eric Robinson made a donation to the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library of sixty medieval charters pertaining to the major Fleming family of Biggar and Cumbernauld. As evidenced by our later blog post, these charters are already shedding new light on this fascinating medieval Fleming family. The University of Toronto library has now completed the digitisation of the charters and they will shortly be made available to researchers in the University of St Andrews Special Collections section. Grants from the P F Charitable Trust and the Wyfold Charitable Trust will permit the translation of the charters. We much appreciate this support.

The Blog

We have developed a pipeline of topics for the blog through to Christmas, including some family studies as well as a number of other intriguing issues. We will then in the New Year suspend the blog as a vehicle for reporting on research and use it solely to announce new information on the upcoming conference.

Dr. Alex Fleming
September 2015

Alex Fleming is a sponsor of and researcher in the Scotland and the Flemish People Project.  He is also the editor of the project blog.

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