Ferguson History

There is no evidence that those who bear this name descend from a single progenitor of the name of Fergus, or that they have ever been organized as a Ferguson clan. Indeed, families of this name, apparently unconnected, have been long settled as far a field as Aberdeenshire and Dumfries-shire, Fife, Perthshire and Ayrshire.
Dr. Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), the distinguished philosopher and historian, belonged to the house of Dunfallandy whose Chief was called Baron Ferguson. His father was the minister at Logierait in Perthshire, and Adam himself became chaplain to the 42nd Regiment and was present at the battle of Fontenoy. Subsequently he was Professor of Mathematics, then of Moral Philosophy, at Edinburgh University. During the American War of Independence he was sent across the Atlantic with the commission which attempted to make terms with the rebellious colonists in 1778-9. He lived to become the close friend of Sir Walter Scott.
Robert Fergusson was, by contrast, the son of a bank clerk who had moved to Edinburgh from Aberdeen. He died in 1774, at the age of twenty-three, on a bed of straw in an asylum cell, his ears filled with the shrieks of the insane, and was buried in an unmarked grave. But when Robert Burns came to Edinburgh he sought out Fergusson’s burial-place, uncovered the head and embraced it. He then obtained permission to raise a monument above it. For in his short life Fergusson had composed a body of poetry which ranks with that of Burns himself.
The present Chief of the name is Sir Charles of Kilkerran, whose uncle, Sir Bernard Fergusson, was the outstanding guerilla leader of the Chindits in the Far East during the 1939-45 war. A former Governor-General of New Zealand, Sir Bernard was made a Life Peer in 1972, taking the title Baron Ballantrae of Auchairan.