Clan Kerr
also Carr, Ker, Clan Kerr
Late but in earnest — riding clan of the Roxburgh marches.
CoreHistoric reach
The seat of Clan Kerr
Seat vacantChief
No chief yet. The seat awaits its first claimant — be the first to stake your name to Clan Kerr.
Current mission
No mission proclaimed. The chief, once seated, sets the clan’s public focus — a campaign, a contest, a piece of restoration, a year of remembrance.
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Stake your name →Motto
Sero sed serio
— Late but in earnest
What does the Kerr name mean?
From Old Norse kjarr — brushwood, marshland — and through it from a Norman family of De Carre or De Ker who came to the Anglo-Scottish Borders in the 12th century. Two branches founded the principal Scottish line: the Kerrs of Cessford (whose senior branch became Marquesses of Lothian) and the Kerrs of Ferniehirst (Earls of Ancram). The Kerrs of the Borders were among the principal 'riding clans' — Border families whose effective government was a code of cattle-raiding (reiving) and feud across the Anglo-Scottish boundary, lasting from the 14th century to the Union of the Crowns in 1603.
The history of Clan Kerr
The Kerrs were one of the great riding clans of the Scottish Middle March, with seats at Ferniehirst Castle near Jedburgh (the Ferniehirst Kerrs) and Cessford Castle near Kelso (the Cessford Kerrs). The two branches feuded with each other and with the Scotts, the Pringles and the Rutherfords; the surrender of the riding-clan code came under James VI in the years before and after the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when the borders were renamed the 'Middle Shires' and the surviving reiver chiefs were reduced or executed under royal commission. Family tradition holds that the Kerrs were the foremost left-handed family of the Borders — the chiefly seats reportedly built with spiral staircases turning the wrong way for a right-handed swordsman.
Sir John Kerr (1914–1991), the Australian Governor-General, dismissed the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975 — the only such dismissal in Australian constitutional history. Deborah Kerr (1921–2007), the Helensburgh-born actress of From Here to Eternity and The King and I, received six Best Actress Oscar nominations, a record for an actress without winning, and was given an Honorary Academy Award in 1994. Roy Kerr (b. 1934), the New Zealand mathematician, found the exact solution to Einstein's field equations describing rotating black holes (the Kerr metric, 1963) — one of the foundational results of modern general relativity.
Notable bearers of the Kerr name
- Sir John Kerr (1914–1991) — Australian Governor-General; the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government
- Deborah Kerr (1921–2007) — actress, six-time Oscar nominee
- Roy Kerr (b. 1934) — mathematician, discoverer of the Kerr metric (rotating black holes)