Author: Swan, William
Biography:
SWAN, William (1791-1866: ancestry.co.uk)
The 1861 Census gives his place and year of birth as Milton, Fife, in about 1791; he may have been the William Swan whose birth on 21 June 1791 to James Swan and his wife Jannet Wilson was registered in nearby Markinch, Fife. The Fife Herald, reporting on a sermon he gave in Kirkaldy in 1832, gives the only account of his early life. In about 1815 he was an accountant in a bank in Kirkaldy, Fife, but he moved to Glasgow to study at the Theological Academy founded by the Rev. Greville Ewing who later edited his Idolatry. He was ordained as a Congregational minister and, influenced by Ewing, he joined the London Missionary Society. Swan travelled to Siberia, going to Seleninsk via St. Petersburg to join the mission preaching to the Buryat Mongols that had been established in 1819 by Edward Stallybrass. He arrived there in February 1820 and worked with Stallybrass and Robert Yiulle on a Mongolian version of the Old Testament which was printed on the mission’s own press in Selenginsk and Khodon. In 1828 Stallybrass moved to Khodon and Swan to Ona, Buryatia. Swan returned to Scotland in the early 1830s to superintend publication of their translation. In Leith, Midlothian, on 25 Apr. 1832 he married Hannah Cullen; the ceremony was performed by the Rev. Ewing. Hannah and William travelled to Siberia but they returned to Scotland when the mission was closed by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1840. He worked with Stallybrass on a Mongolian translation of the New Testament, published in 1846. At the time of the 1861 Census he was living in Edinburgh and it was likely there that he died in 1866. Other publications include Memoir of the Late Mrs. Paterson…St. Petersburg (1823), Letters on Missions (1843), and Heart Musings (1866). (ancestry.co.uk 19 Jan. 2022; ODNB for Greville Ewing and Edward Stallybrass; Fife Herald 2 Feb. 1832; Caledonian Mercury 25 Apr. 1832; London Missionary Society in Siberia, SOAS Archives, archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/gb102-ms380624 20 Jan. 2022)
Other Names:
- W. Swan