It is over a decade now since Brian Morris and Charles Mosley initiated the labours that were to resuscitate and bring this world-renowned title up to date for publication in the form of its two-volume 106th Edition in 1999. Brian Morris passed his responsibility as publisher to me and my colleagues in 2000. Our aim is to maintain its revival and we have been mightily pleased that Charles Mosley has remained as our Editor-in-Chief for this 107th Edition. To edit Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage is a challenge calling for the highest genealogical scholarship, and he has assembled a team that has been well up to the task. We know you as readers will be as grateful as we are.

To publish Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage is also a challenge of the highest order. As a ‘printed book’ 107th Edition now in three weighty volumes, with almost 5,000 pages of meticulously laid out articles, each extensively researched, cross-referenced, indexed and proofed, it is unambiguously a high-risk front-end investment. Its marketing, selling and distribution around the globe so as to recover the investment made is as complex as any genealogical article included here spanning 1000 years, and has meant allocating considerable resources to those who so honourably assist in the project. Yet in 1999/2000 Brian Morris showed with his 106th Edition that breakeven could be almost reached. We have been brave enough, and believed in the product enough, to follow in his footsteps.

But neither do we seriously believe that Burke’s Peerage & Baronetage will continue as a traditional publication in the future. We have no plans for a 108th Edition per se. This 107th is likely to be the Final Edition in the form we have known it since it first appeared in 1826. We believe, and have indeed already demonstrated at www.burkes-peerage.net, that its future lies in using its digitised data as an online accessible subscription service. As such, it will be updated on a regular annual basis rather than, as in the past, with discrete volumes captured as hard copy print. It is a future where email will be used increasingly to elicit the necessary contributions from new entrants and to update what we have already captured.

Since this 21st-century service has already been available on the internet at £15.95 (+ vat where app.) per day/£64.95 (+ vat where app.) per year for nigh on two years, it might be wondered why this ‘Final Edition’ is appearing in print at all. Is it being published to give a flourish to our website services or to provide readers and collectors with a last chance offer to own a copy, or both? Well, we do sincerely hope for both of these outcomes, but they are not our raison d’etre. This 107th Edition is going into print to put down a very tangible marker on behalf of the families included at a time when Scottish feudal land tenure is finally being abolished and nearly all hereditary peers have been made to vacate their historic seats in the House of Lords at Westminster. Whatever the new dawn for land tenure in Scotland, and whatever outcome the Commoners at Westminster may determine for the Other Place, the contribution of the families listed here is indelibly etched on the history and values of this Kingdom and of its many Dominions and Territories across the seas. No reforming zeal, whether well-meant or misguided, relevant or irrelevant, can take that away. Neither, and this is perhaps even more significant, can such zeal take away the abiding curiosity and interest each and every one of us has in history as exemplified by these families.

Our niched publication fields at our website, directly drawing on the database of over three million records to focus on American Presidents, British American Families, Irish Family Records, British Prime Ministers and in particular on the Nobility and Landed Gentry of the Kingdom in Scotland, are all immensely popular, receiving millions of visitors. Genealogy is one of the fastest-growing leisure activities in the western world today. And the power of the search engines that give access to the online database puts the traditional skills of the professional Society of Indexers in the shade. Who served in which regiment, went to Eton or to Harvard or St Andrews Universities? Who has daughters or sons coming of age? Our associated family forums give the opportunity for cousins and more distant relatives around the globe to get in touch and stay in touch. Chiefs of Clans and Names have myriad tales to tell of awakening interest in traditional cultures and values that the Internet can stimulate and sustain. Only recently Burke’s took part in celebrations with the Head of the Mures Family in Hobart, Tasmania and the Macdowalls in Victoria, British Columbia.

Ease of access is perhaps the most overwhelmingly obvious benefit of the Burke’s online service. Few of us will sit down to browse these pages to fill an idle hour, although it can be enormously rewarding. Few of us leave the pages open in our library at home or bookmarked at our own family entries. Most of us come to Burke’s to search for information we need urgently and it seldom disappoints if we log on to the Internet. Let me illustrate by taking a personal instance relating to my own Scottish feudal barony of Prestoungrange. One of its treasures is a Gothenburg Public House built in 1908 by temperance enthusiasts to encourage eating and mitigate the undesirable effects of perpendicular drinking. The movement had its origins amongst social reformers and municipal socialists towards the end of the 19th century. One of its great advocates was Earl Grey, who founded Trust Houses, which eventually merged with Charles Forte’s hotel empire. Earl Grey, Burke’s shows, later became Governor General of Canada, influencing the Canadians’ approach towards temperance and in the 1920s to prohibition. In the British Isles the movement reached its high point with the nationalisation of all the pubs and breweries in Carlisle, Gretna and Cromarty in World War I. This lasted until the 1970s.

The Prestoungrange pub was called a ‘Gothenburg’ because the model adopted came from that city. The return on the capital investment was capped at 5% and the surplus accruing was given by trustees to facilitate alternative local recreational activities such as bowls, cinemas and dance halls. More than 400 ‘Gothenburgs’ were eventually built and owned across Britain. I visited the Lord Mayor of Gothenburg in 2002 to research the origins of the system, which are brilliantly archived in that city. Gothenburg’s East India Company, shipyards, textiles, porter-brewing and football teams were all established by Scotsmen, as was its Chalmers’ University. Burke’s role lay in bringing to light the origins of more than a few of the eight founders, whom we had previously assumed to be local citizenry. The early company archives show that supposition to be quite incorrect. Thomas Nelson III, head of the great Scottish publishing family, who died at the Battle of Arras in 1917, provided all the initial investment as a loan. A fellow officer, Scott Plummer, who also fought at Arras but survived, was in the same Lothian and Border Horse as Nelson and became Lord-Lieutenant of Selkirk. Munro-Ferguson was an individual of great distinction who went on, as Lord Novar, to become Governor General and C-in-C of Australia during World War I before returning to Britain as Secretary of State for Scotland. The trustees included two Nova Scotia baronets, one becoming Lord Carmichael on his appointment as Governor of Madras and the other becoming Lord-Lieutenant of Fife. The shareholders included Sir William Haldane, Sir Michael Nair and Sir Edward Tennant, who was later Lord-Lieutenant for Peebles and Lord High Commissioner of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, in addition becoming Lord Glenconner.

As our Gothenburg pub is resuscitated this year with its original purpose reinstated, and its original founders identified and honoured due to Burke’s and with the Lord Mayor of Gothenburg in attendance, there is not a single doubt in my mind as publisher that what Burke’s offers for the future is vibrant, significant and very much worthwhile. As an Internet-accessible service, millions not hundreds of individuals can accomplish what I was able to do and much more besides simply by going online. The team of young individuals, led by Michael Cross, Anne Christie and Christine Wiles at our publishing offices in Stokesley, North Yorkshire, working with Thomas Technology in Oxford, have excelled themselves and have my deepest gratitude. They surely have our best wishes and support for the coming years as they take on even greater responsibilities for the future of the Burke’s name and its global emarketing.

So is there now no future for Burke’s books at all? Not at all. We all certainly believe there is, but the books to be published in hard-copy volumes will not involve reprinting the ‘total’ genealogical electronic database. Indeed on occasion they will make no use of the Burke’s database at all. As this 107th Edition goes to print we are, for example, publishing two intriguing new titles – Lordly Cartoons and London’s Waterfront. Both are the product of very considerable research in our best traditions, as exemplified here by Charles Mosley and his genealogical team. But they are books to browse and read, not searchable databases; that, we believe, is the secret of their potential for success as books per se in the Internet age.

* As I sign off here as publisher in print for this 107th Edition of Burke’s Peerage & Baronetage, my colleagues and I have feelings not of regret but rather of excitement that a phoenix approach to the awesome inheritance that Burke’s represents has seemingly been identified and made economically possible for the coming years. There were many amongst us who feared that it actually might be lost. Brian Morris began the renaissance we have been privileged to continue. And if Burke’s can do it in the 21st century ? and we have ? there is no reasonable doubt that the far, far greater inheritance of the families herein will do it a thousand-fold and more.

Gordon Prestoungrange
Baron of Prestoungrange