Robert Riddle Stodart
Robert Riddle Stodart’s lifelong interest in genealogy and heraldry began early, before 1845 when he was sent to Ceylon at the age of eighteen. During the next sixteen years, while managing a coffee plantation, he indulged in research “ almost amounting to a passion ” and had “nearly every work of importance on these subjects which appeared either in Britain or on the Continent forwarded to him.” One of those books would undoubtedly have been Burke’s Landed Gentry , which appeared in 1846 under the title ‘A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland, a companion to the Baronetage and Knightage’ . It included a section on his own family: “STODART OF KAILZIE AND ORMISTON”, represented by his uncle George Stodart. The Kailzie estate, between Peebles and Cardrona in Scotland, was acquired by Robert Riddle Stodart’s grandfather Robert Stodart (1748-1831), who in patenting the English Grand Action in 1777 is credited in creating the grand pian...
