A copy of William Balbirnie's book on the Vances held at the National Library of Scotland has recently been digitized and is available at http://www.archive.org/details/accounthistorica00balb (note the Creative Commons license for the digital copy).

That copy is interesting for two reasons: first, because it includes a photograph of William and his daughter Margaret Vance Balbirnie (the only picture of them I'm aware of), and second, because bound at the back is a copy of his much rarer "An Account of the Family of Balbirnie" in which he explores the history of his own family surname. He covers his own immediate ancestry, the different Balbirnie families, their coats of arms, and some of the family legends.

I drew up the coat of arms that William describes for the Balbirnies of Inverighty (his line) and am attaching it here, but note that he describes a slightly different shield for the Balbirnies of that ilk (i.e. Balbirnie of Balbirnie), although he says that line died out.

As to William himself, I have some details collected from his own works, Ancestry.com, and LDS Church records, although the LDS records can be suspect these days so I would urge anyone using these to find confirmation through other records.

William Balbirnie was born in 1812 in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of George Balbirnie and Margaret Vance. The Balbirnie family was an old Scottish house from Inverighty in Forfarshire with titles and estates through to the 17th century when William’s 3rd-great-grandfather aligned himself with the wrong side in one of the Scottish civil wars and had his title and estates forfeited as a result. William only mentions this Balbirnie history in passing in his Vance book but it may have provided at least some of the basis for his own continual hunt for noble connections through other family names.

According to William, his father was an officer in a Scottish regiment, posted to Coagh “during the time of the Irish rebellion” around 1796 where he met and on 13 November 1797 married a local Irishwoman named Margaret Vance. By 1810 the couple had moved to Glasgow where George joined the family business as a dyer. In Glasgow 9 of their 10 children were born, including William.

William became a dyer like his father, and on 13 April 1835 married Margaret Bouglass Glenn and had 3 daughters: Ellen Bouglass Craig Balbirnie, Margaret Vance Balbirnie, and Wilhelmina Balbirnie. But by the time he wrote his book his wife and children had died except for his daughter Margaret Vance Balbirnie, born on 21 September 1839 , whom he called a “much-loved daughter… the last remnant of a much loved and joyous hearth.” William lived most of his pre-1860 adult life in Cork, Ireland, as did his daughter Margaret – who on 29 August 1868 married a Philip Lovel Roche in Cork.

The book on the Vances was first prompted by William’s older brother Robert Anstruther Balbirnie who moved to Australia in 1839, but in 1854 he brought his family back for an expected two year stay in Great Britain and at that time for reasons unknown became seized with a desire to learn more about his mother’s Vance family. He sent William an urgent letter to “incur any expense” to gather up the history of his grandfather John Vance of Coagh and other Vances. William dutifully spent the next six years talking to family members, writing letters to various Vances in Ireland, and finally embarking on at least one tour of Donegal in the pursuit of the details that would become his book finally published in 1860.

After 1860 William seems to have joined his relative Charles Balbirnie in Philadephia in the dyer business (Charles wasn't his brother and the relationship isn't clear, but they were obviously related), possibly capitalizing on the boom in Union military uniforms for the American Civil War. On 27 December 1861 he married another Vance descendant in Philadelphia, Margaret Vance McIlwaine (the granddaughter of his great-aunt, born in 1840 in Londonderry). He may have continued to live in Cork, Ireland since the births of his first five children are listed there in Irish records from 1864 through 1873; however by 1880 he had emigrated officially to Philadelphia. One genealogy book of the time (Charles Browning, Americans of Royal Descent (Philadelphia; Porter & Coates, 1891), p 559) lists William Balbirnie, his wife and his 6 children by name as Philadephia residents. The family is also listed by name in the 1880 Federal Census in the 7th Ward, 8th District of Philadelphia (and Charles Balbirnie and family are listed in the 7th Ward, 4th/5th Districts).

His new wife had a pedigree of her own, since her 2nd great grandfather was Cadwalader, Lord Blayney, the 7th Baron of Monaghan in the Peerage of Ireland, and it appears that William integrated this new noble connection right into his pantheon, as two of the children of his second family were named Harold Hubert de Vaux Balbirnie and Cadwalader Davis Blayney Balbirnie with 3 of the other 4 receiving either Vance or Blayney as a middle name.

There is probably more that could be discovered about William Balbirnie’s life in Philadelphia from local sources – but the last item available in LDS Church records is that William Balbirnie died in 1886 in Philadelphia at the age of 74.

I have a notation passed along from another researcher that some of the Philadelphia Balbirnies are buried in Fernwood Cemetery near Philadelphia, but I have no confirmation of that and Fernwood isn't well-indexed on the Internet.

Hope all that helps...

Dave Vance