Over 2,000 Scottish historical letters were stolen. They were found in Canada

As It Happens6:15Over two thousand Scottish historical letters were stolen. They were found in Canada

After three decades, thousands of historical documents have been returned to their rightful home at the National Records of Scotland. 

Alan Borthwick, an archivist at the National Records of Scotland who played a key role in bringing them back, expressed a "sense of satisfaction" as they're now ready to be used by a new generation of historians. 

The lost letters, which were returned on March 25, include family, estate and business correspondence, some dating all the way back to the 1600s.

And to Borthwick's surprise, they had been taken.

How they went missing

The National Records of Scotland is tasked with preserving and maintaining the country's public records, ensuring that they're accessible for research, education and legal purposes. 

But in 1994, an unsettling discovery was made. 

A total of 200 items from their collection surfaced at an auction in London. It prompted an investigation, and Borthwick from the National Records of Scotland was tasked to crack the case. 

"My colleague ... was astonished to see a lot of letters which probably came from collections which we held in our office, so we were able to recover the lot," Borthwick told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

"When it was brought back to our office in Edinburgh, I was asked if I could have a look through."

As Borthwick sifted through the items, he matched their reference numbers to their parent collection and was astounded — the items were stolen from the National Records of Scotland.

"That was when alarm bells really began to ring," said Borthwick. 

But it wasn't difficult to identify the alleged culprit — even though whoever had taken the documents had gone to great lengths to cover up their theft by removing reference numbers and replacing items with forgeries. 

Through cross-referencing with the national archive's record of users that date all the way back to 1847, Borthwick zeroed in on one man: David Stirling Macmillan. 

Born in 1925 in Scotland, Macmillan had worked at the archive for just a year starting in 1949, though he continued to have access to the archive long after. 

That access was revoked in 1980 after he was caught removing a document from the archive. 

At the time, the staff believed it was an isolated incident. But as Borthwick would later discover, the scale, he'd eventually come to realize, was far greater. 

The plot thickens 

Over a decade later in 2012, Borthwick was contacted by a researcher who had seen a reference in an online catalogue at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., to an item that seemed to have Scottish origins. 

Upon visiting Trent University, Borthwick said he was shocked. Around 2,000 items that had been allegedly stolen by Macmillan from the National Records of Scotland and were being housed in Canada. 

In fact, there were 3,100 stolen items found. Among them, around 500 documents were stolen from other institutions across the U.K. Around 500 items belong to collections held by private owners and 100 items have an unknown origin. 

It turns out that Macmillan, who had moved to Canada in 1968, had taught history at the school for 20 years. He died in 1987, and the documents were given to the university. 

Borthwick says the now-retired archivist at the school was "utterly astonished." 

"They couldn't have imagined that. There's no reason for them to imagine that … these documents that professor Macmillan bequeathed to the archives, could have been stolen," said Borthwick. 

Searching for clues 

Though it's not possible to ask Macmillan, who was not charged with a crime, about his motive, Borthwick says that the items themselves, a large cache of individual letters, have clued him in. 

"We began to realize that most likely, professor Macmillan's abiding interest, was postal history, in other words, postmarks on letters," said Borthwick. 

The letters, mostly correspondence between Scottish people to those living overseas, were marked with distinctive and unusual postmarks.

And Borthwick speculates that it might have been an innocent thought that led to the deed. 

"We think, perhaps, that professor Macmillan thought, 'Oh, that's a really nice, interesting looking postmark, I wish I could have that in my collection.'"