Hew Scott

His "magnum opus" is the comprehensive, multi-volume work, Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae: The succession of ministers in the parish churches of Scotland, from the reformation, A.D. 1560, to the present time.

[citation needed] He was born in Haddington, East Lothian on 5 February 1791, the son of Robert Scott an excise officer (a distant cousin of Sir Walter Scott) and his second wife, Catherine Dunbar of Coldingham.

He taught himself Latin by the age of 10 and was encouraged by the local minister, Rev Dr Lorimer, to study for the ministry.

Through his mother's relatives in Coldingham he appears to have met George Dunbar who despite both poverty and disablement managed to gain a degree at Glasgow University.

He studied a wide range of subjects and said "had the [Napoleonic] war continued, he would have been an army surgeon rather than a minister".

He had a series of minor roles as assistant at variously, Garvald, Whitekirk, Cockpen and Temple.

In 1867 he received an honorary Doctorate of Divinity (DD) from St Andrews University mainly for his work on Fasti (which was first published in 1866).