Legacy & Lineage
The Hamilton crest is an oak tree with a saw driven through the trunk. Above it, a ducal coronet. Around it, on the strap and buckle, a single word.
Through.
Not onward. Not ever upward. Not a Latin phrase you’d need a scholar to unpack. One English preposition, and not even a flattering one. Most clan mottos are boasts. This one is an instruction.
The traditional story attached to it — and it should be called a story, because it’s clan legend rather than documented history — is that Sir Gilbert de Hamilton escaped English pursuers by disguising himself as a woodcutter. As the riders closed in, he was sawing at an oak, and gave the word to his companion to keep going. Through.
Whether it happened that way hardly matters now. What matters is that a family looked at every possible thing they could have carved onto their arms for the next seven hundred years and chose the moment of being halfway through a cut with men riding toward them.
Consider what that leaves out.
There’s no victory in the crest. No lion, no sword, no crown taken from anyone. There’s a saw stuck in a tree and an unfinished job. The image is of the hardest part of the work, frozen at the point where quitting is the reasonable option.
I’ve been thinking about mottos as compressed operating instructions — the way Solomon wrote proverbs, or the way a good company value is one sentence you can actually apply on a Tuesday. Most of them fail because they describe a state rather than an action. Excellence. Integrity. Nobody has ever made a decision differently because of a wall that says excellence.
Through only means anything when you’re mid-cut. It’s useless as a boast and precise as a command.
The line
The line it came down through is documented well enough. Margaret Julia Ogden married Gavin Hamilton Sr., a Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Their son was John Rae Hamilton, who married Elisabeth Manson. Their daughter Adelaide Hamilton, born 1888, married Raymond Gaynor Wise. Then Raymond Thomas John Wise, Donald William Wise, and me.
A note on that name, because it trips people up and it trips up the search engines too. John Rae Hamilton is my direct ancestor. Dr. John Rae — the Orkney-born Arctic explorer, the Hudson’s Bay Company surgeon who walked the Arctic and brought back the fate of the Franklin expedition — is a different man, connected through the Rae side of the family. Two John Raes, one family, entirely different lives. I’ve written about the explorer elsewhere. This post is about the word on the badge.
Though the two do rhyme, if you let them.
Dr. John Rae’s method was to keep going on foot when the Royal Navy insisted on ships. He walked thousands of miles in conditions that killed better-funded men, using local technique instead of imported equipment, and got the answer nobody else got. Then he was punished socially for the answer he brought back. He went through anyway, and the vindication took roughly a century and a half to arrive.
Why it still works
Almost nothing in business fails at the start. Starting is easy and slightly euphoric. Things fail in the middle — at the point where the initial energy is spent, the results haven’t arrived, and there’s a completely defensible story available about why stopping is the mature decision. The renovation at eighty percent. The content engine at week six. The hire you’re managing instead of releasing. The market cycle you said you’d hold through, right up until it got quiet.
That’s the saw in the tree. Every one of those moments looks exactly like the crest.
And the instruction is not try harder, which is noise. It’s directional. You’re already in the cut. The only movement available that isn’t a loss is forward, and the reason to keep going is that you decided at the start that you would.
Most families that came out of Scotland with nothing and ended up somewhere else were doing precisely that, over and over, for generations. Through the crossing. Through the winter. Through the work nobody wanted.
I didn’t pick the motto. It was picked a long time ago by people whose names I’ll never know, and it survived because it was worth carrying.
One word. No decoration. Keep cutting.