Biography | Adam Smith — Baptised in Kirkcaldy, on the Street Where the House Stood

People treat 5 June 1723 as the day Adam Smith was born.

The parish book records a baptism, not a birth.

On 5 June 1723, Old Style, the Kirkcaldy register entered the child of Mr Adam Smith and Margaret Douglas, with James Oswald and a Miller of the town as witnesses.

The actual day he was born was not written down.

Britain still used the Julian calendar; the same baptism falls on 16 June in the New Style calendar adopted in 1752.

The monument later raised over his Edinburgh grave chose the parish date and called it a birthday.

He was already fatherless.

Adam Smith the elder, Writer to the Signet and comptroller of customs for the Kirkcaldy district, died in January 1723, months before the baptism.

The boy was the only child of that marriage.

Margaret Douglas, daughter of the Douglases of Strathendry, raised him in her house on this High Street, a long mercantile front that faced the Forth and the custom work her husband had done.

That house is gone.

A bronze plaque at 220 High Street, erected in 1953 by the Kirkcaldy Naturalists' Society, states that the home of his mother stood on this site and that the building was removed in 1834.

The tenement now on the lot, nos. 218-222, is itself a Category B listed block put up after the demolition.

A close nearby still carries his name.

The childhood that can be pinned is therefore a street, not a room.

He left it for the University of Glasgow in 1737, at fourteen, and came back to the same site in the late 1760s to write.

The first fact on the ground is quieter than the later fame: a posthumous customs clerk's son, entered in a Fife parish book, raised by a widow on a trading street.

Stand here for the origin, not for the book.

The book belongs to a later decade in the same vanished house.

Photo: James Eaton-Lee, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait etching after James Tassie's 1787 medallion, public domain.