James Gordon BROWN

British Prime Minister, 2007 - 2010
Born February 20, 1951, Giffnock, Scotland

Gordon Brown Being Scottish and the leader of the United Kingdom, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has stressed his loyalty to the Union between Scotland and England while taking a calculated and deliberate decision with his wife Sarah to have his children born not just in Scotland, but in Fife, where they have a home and where Brown serves as a Member of Parliament. Brown's line of descent is associated with the land, as farm labourers, ploughmen and farmers. Unlike their acclaimed descendent, his father apart, all of Brown's ancestors married young and were survived by many offspring.

Gordon’s father John Ebenezer, was a minister of the Church of Scotland. The Rev. John’s mother, Rachel Mavor, was the daughter of James Mavor, who progressed from being a mason at the time of the 1870 marriage in Burntisland to being a ‘builder employing 17 men and three boys’ by the time of the 1881 census. Gordon Brown’s parents, John Ebenezer and Jessie Souter, married in Aberdeen in 1947, his bride being from a family long established in the rural Aberdeenshire parishes of Insch and Auchindoir. Jessie’s father, John, was a timber merchant and was descended from a family of masons and carpenters.

On his mother’s side and a few generations back Gordon has an English connection. The father of John Souter’s wife, Jessie Manson, proved to be the illegitimate son of an English-born and London-trained surgeon. Jessie’s father was Francis Manson, and he was born in Inverkeithney, Banffshire, to the unmarried Jessie CRUICKSHANK and Alexander James Mason. Jessie was a lady’s maid who married a farmer named Alexander Murison and lived in Fyvie with him and his three children. The ‘reputed’ father Alexander was a man of great intelligence and appears to have been in general practice as a surgeon in Scotland. His illegitimate son seems to have been adopted and it is not known if son and father ever knew each other.