Archibald Douglas Sommers

• Birth Notes
  • Information from Peter Gibson

• General Notes
  • Archibald Douglas Sommers was my ancestor (my gggg grandfather).  He moved to the east end of Glasgow and became a cotton spinner, presumably using the recently invented machinery.  He appears to have given this up to became a landlord.  He is often described in documents as a portioner, which normally means they inherited land (they got a portion of an estate), but the only property transactions I have yet found for him have him purchasing land, rather than inheriting it  (although at one point he did borrow money from his brother John to finance property transactions).  Archibald was married on 18 October 1795 to Hannah White, who was probably from Ayrshire.  They had about 13 children between then and 1818.  All of them bar one pre-deceased their father – from the ages at death it is likely most had tuberculosis.  Hannah White died in 1844 in Glasgow.  Archibald died 4 July 1857, also in Glasgow.  The one child who survived him, also a Janet Cunningham Sommers, inherited his land, and when she died 9 years later, it passed to her cousin Thomas Forrester Sommers.  I am descended from Archibald and Hannah’s son John Sommers (1808-1847).  He was the only one of the Sommers children to marry and have children.  After he died his widow, Ann, went to Australia with her family (father and brothers) and her two children, Hannah and John.  Hannah became a grocer and John a professional artist.
    
    
    
    The artist bit is interesting.  There is a family story that the Sommers are descended from Jan (John) van Sommer, who was a Flemish painter and court painter to Charles 1 of England in the 1600s.  The van Sommers later returned to Flanders, but one of them came back to Scotland, and ran off with one of the daughters of the Douglas family.  I am not sure how much of this is wishful thinking by later generations, as I can find no evidence, but my ancestor was called Archibald Douglas Sommers well before any of them became artists  (and Archibald being a common name in the Douglas family).  Nevertheless, the story had sufficient currency that John, the artist, named his son John Archibald Douglas Sommers, and the next generation adopted the surname “van Sommers”.