Over the last thirty years a great deal of effort has gone into tracing the ancestry of William Armit of Scoonie, County Fife, Scotland, who married Agnes Lees.  It is a considerable disappointment to have to say at the outset that, in spite of persistent research, no provable link to William’s ancestry has been found.  Anecdotal evidence suggests possible antecedents in France but this cannot be proven and DNA tests suggest otherwise.  These documents present many gaps and really no hints as to direct connections.  Attempts were made to track the appearance of Armit families in England and Scotland, but again none of these early records seems to relate specifically to William Armit.

     At one time, it seemed possible that William Armit was the son of John Armit and Janet Fortune.  This couple had a younger son, Robert Armit, who established his family at a property variously called Little Polduff, Wester Polduff or Winchester Polduff, near St. Andrew’s.  The Scots Ancestry Research Society did extensive research in the 1970s but could not find documents to prove the connection.  Along the way the Society discovered, among other things, that there were four other William Armits, all born between 1725 and 1734, in the neighboring parishes of Kettle (which produced two Williams), St. Andrews and Cupar (each with one).  None of these Williams could be connected to William of Scoonie.  Unless some new sources turn up, the conclusion has to be that the records simply do not exist.  

     William’s son, John Armit of Dublin, did nothing to dispel the mystery.  He and his brother William were eighteenth-century examples of upward mobility, and they were quite content to let their modest origins in Scotland remain in obscurity.  There are hints of aristocratic connections in both France and Scotland, but the truth is probably that the Armits were modest lowland farmers from County Fife.  

     Although the Armit family can’t be traced farther back than the eighteenth century, it is possible to identify a vast network of William and Agnes’s descendants.  The Armit cousinage includes a few eccentrics, who stand out in contrast to the staid ranks of army officers, landowners, clergymen, and businessmen.  A lady Raffles; a titled racing car driver; a pioneer parachutist; a deputy governor of the Bank of England and his daughters, the “Bank Babies;” Oscar Wilde’s alcoholic brother; three Arctic explorers, including the aforementioned parachutist; a bankrupt landowner who spent a good part of his days in Marshalsea prison; and a field marshal all make for a variegated company.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

     The family history also presents a number of confusing passages, owing to the propensity of William and Agnes’s descendants to marry within the family.  Two of their son William’s daughters married cousins: Charity Armit wed Thomas Orde Lees, while her sister Diana Armit married Richard Armit.  John Christopher Giffard Armit took as his wife Mary Eyre, daughter of John Eyre and his wife Mary Armit.  As a result of these cousinly alliances, names appear that are seemingly coupled in the wrong order: John Lees Armit and William Armit Lees, John Eyre Armit and William Armit Eyre.  Rachel Holmes, herself a ‘double Armit,’ being descended from two different daughters of the younger William Armit, then married another of William’s descendants, her cousin Cecil Henry Farrer Thompson.  Their three sons are thus thrice descended from William Armit.  Not counting two marriages of de Teissiers and Braddells in the family of John Lees Armit, this history records eight unions of Armit cousins.   

     The branches of an already confused family tree are made denser by the repetition of first names.  John, William, George, Charles, James and Richard appeared frequently, with a sprinkling of such exotic names as Marmaduke.  For girls the favorite names seem to have been Agnes, Mary, Georgina, Diana, Emily, Eleanor, Noëmi, and Charity.  In later generations Charity evolved to Cherry, then was further transmogrified to Cerise.  

     Whatever the repetition and confusion about names, the story of the Armits begins simply enough in 1757 in Scoonie with the marriage of William Armit to Agnes Lees.  Now almost 250 years later, William and Agnes’s descendants, to the ninth generation, are scattered throughout the British Isles, with numerous branches in Australia and Canada and a small contingent in the United States. 

      It is a matter of regret that we have not been able to trace to the present generations all branches of the family.  It was often difficult to find out to whom to write, especially for those who descended in the female line.  In the cases of the Espeut and Annaly families the information is readily available in published sources, is voluminous, and if included here would have made an already-overlong narrative even longer.  We hope that the full treatment of the earlier generations will be a compensation for these omissions.