Robert Fyfe Findlay Salmond

From his son, Rt. Hon. Alex Salmond's speech to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland at The Mound in Edinburgh, Monday, May 25, 2009:

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Perhaps Moderator - coming from Burns' country - you were struck, as I was, at the happy coincidence of your appointment with our Year of Homecoming, celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns.

In fact, only a week past Saturday I opened the new Burns Monument Centre in your native Kilmarnock.

That Centre has a fantastic genealogical archive, allowing visitors to trace their own family history. And indeed recently on the Radio Scotland programme, 'Digging Up Your Roots', I discovered just how interesting that can be.

On air a professor from Strathclyde asked me if I knew why very unusually my father's name had been re-registered after birth - a range of possibilities opened up!

Luckily I actually did know. His name was changed to place the name of the local minister in the middle of my father's - Robert Fyfe Findlay Salmond - he being the first child christened by Fyfe Findlay in Linlithgow - just as thirty or more years later Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond became the first child christened by Elliot Anderson called to St Ninian's Craigmailan.

I have tried to bear that name with pride and make no mistake as to the extent that my roots lie with this Assembly.