Haa House in Grobsness - Couper family history

[Vanessa]

I would love to know if anyone has any 18thC or early 19thC history of the Haa House in Grobsness...

 

My Great, great grandfather, Daniel Couper, lived there between 1819 & 1940

His father was the fisheries inspector who started living in the Haa House in 1819

 

Daniel Couper was sailing his own 82" boat between Cape Town & London in his early twenties, then he & a brother went through the Australian & Otago goldfields, before setting up the first accomodation house in a remote part of the South Island in New Zealand.

I grew up in the same isolated farming community where he settled 120 years earlier, and most of the farming families i grew up with had settled there in the 1860s as a result of the Highland clearances a generation or two earlier. The isolation & the fact that these farming families didn't move around & weren't very open to outsiders, meant that when i grew up there was still a very distinct kind of culture that had been bought out from Scotland [English settlor families were still very distinct in culture & the two cultures didn't really mix socially / interbreed in the South Island even 120 years after settlement]. This has been great for preserving history!

 

My family has very precise history back to 1819 when the Coupers were living in the Grobsness Haa House, but nothing prior to this.

 

I'm curious as to whether anyone knows when the Haa house was built & what it's history was before my family turned up.

I'm assuming that being a fisheries officer in 1819 was a reasonably political position, but if anyone has any early history of the Couper family i'd also be fascinated to know.

The only early lead i can turn up is that in 1819 the Shetland Coupers had family in Wick, & 'Sinclair' is a family name that has come down through the generations, so they could have had links to clan Sinclair.....

 

http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-NHSJ06_03-t1-body1-d4.html

 

 

 

[MuckleJoannie]

I found this through a convoluted route

 

http://web.archive.org/web/20081201163102/http://shetlopedia.com/Grobsness_Haa

 

 

 

Grobsness Haa, at Grobsness, Delting, North Shetland Mainland, was built in 1800 for George Barron, merchant. The mason was Andrew Herculeson, Easthouse, Grobsness. Barron did not live there long, and thereafter the house was inhabited by various fishery officers. (Ninian Stuart, John Couper, Robert Cowie). After c. 1850 the house became a block of tenements, being occupied until late 1920s.
It is a typical merchant's Haa, two stories and garret, three bays, overlooking what might have been a fishing station. The beach below has a flat area, indicating that it has been used for drying fish.
The roof of the Haa has now collapsed, it was originally roofed with stone slates which were nailed in place with large iron nails.

 

Someone has been researching your family history

 

http://www.bayanne.info/Shetland/getperson.php?personID=I117827&tree=ID1

[Vanessa]

Hi Muckle Joannie - Thank you so much for both sources. They answer a lot of questions. I'll share round family in New Zealand. It means Barron, who built the Haa house must have lived there for less than about 15 years, as John Couper moved in in 1819. The link to family tree also confirms John Couper was born in Wick. I have letters from my Grandmother, who lived with her great grandfather Daniel Couper when she was a child. She talks about the stories he told the kids of sailing & how he used to teach them sailors knots that he learnt in the 'navigation school' at the vicarage in [i think] Walls around 1830