Anthony Adolph - Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History

The GOONs or Guild of One Name Studies (Box G, 14 Charterhouse Buildings, Goswell Road, London EC1M 7BA, 0800 011 2182, www.one-name.org) includes many members studying Scottish surnames.

Scottish family history societies can be found via Genuki (see p. 33) or the Scottish Association of Family History Societies on www.safhs. org.uk.The latter publishes much of local interest and members can be funds of local lore. Many family history societies in Australia, New Zealand and the Americas, incidentally, have Scottish-interest groups, and there are Scottish Societies, including strong genealogical elements, in many countries. The Netherlands, for example, has a flourishing Caledonian Society ( www.caledonian.nl) whose members are mainly descendants of Scots sailors, soldiers and merchants who settled in the Dutch ports.

Most Scottish clans now function through clan societies, that are effectively family and social history societies, as described on p. 160.

Though not really a ‘society’, www.rampantscotland.comis an American website providing copious links to Scottish-interest sites, including travel, cooking, clans and history. The genealogy links page is worth exploring.

The Seallam! Visitor Centre, and its founders, Bill and Chris Lawson, with their fantastic files of island pedigrees.

A fine example of a small local archive is Bill and Chris Lawson’s Co Leis Thu? (which means ‘what people do you belong to?), housed at the Seallam! Visitor Centre, An Taobh Tuath (Northton), Isle of Harris, HS3 3JA, 01859 520258, www.seallam.com.

Realizing that the fantastic oral history surviving amongst the Gaelic speakers in the Hebrides was threatened by the spread of English, Bill learned Gaelic and approached as many Gaelic speakers as possible. Few were willing to talk on tape or even in front of a notebook, so he had to remember what he heard, and record it later. He combined the results with close scrutiny of the available written records. Of these, he comments,

‘Written records in the Islands are generally poor, and were often kept by incomers with no knowledge of Gaelic, and even less interest. Oral tradition, on the other hand, comes from within a community and is much more likely to be accurate, even though it does tend to me more localized. Neither by itself is a complete record, but if the two are amalgamated, a more complete picture emerges, sometimes with surprising results…’

None more so than in the wonderful cases of people who could recite their patronymics – their father’s name, followed by their grandfather’s, great-grandfather’s, and so on. Some patronymics also appear in written records (albeit with rather odd attempts at transliteration), such as parochial registers. Bill says, ‘It can take some patience to recognize John Mcoil vicunlay vicormett as Iain macDhomhnaill mhic Fhionnlaidh mhic Thormoid – John son of Donald son of Finlay son of Norman,’ though of course the effort is entirely worth it as, in this case, it provides a four-generation pedigree.

The main records to which he tried to link oral pedigrees were the census returns, which are theoretically complete. Onto this dual peg, Bill could then hang any other information available – civil registration, parochial registers and so on. The results are astonishing – over 10,500 pedigree sheets, each neatly drawn out in immaculate handwriting, covering all the families of the islands of the Outer Hebrides (Harris, Lewis, Barra, North and South Uist and the smaller associated islands). As the 1851 census includes the elderly, many of these pedigrees go back to the late 1700s.

Bill’s main clients (he makes his information available for a very modest fee) are descendants of the islands’ many late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emigrants. Some Lewis and Harris sheep farmers went as far as the Falkland Islands and Patagonia, but most Lewis people went to eastern Quebec and Bruce County, Ontario, later ones making for the Gaelic-speaking areas already colonized by their kin, whilst Uist and Harris people set sail for Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island, and from 1850s onwards to Australia. Judging by where they settled, Bill often has a head start working out where they would have originated. Sometimes there are clues in the emigrant communities, reminding us that our ancestors lived in extended families, and that we should always look beyond the narrow confines of our direct ancestral lines. Thus, MacDonalds on their own may be fairly ubiquitous, but MacDonalds mixed with Steeles indicate migrants from South Uist (where the surname was adopted by a group of MacLeans who wanted to disguise their identity from some vengeful Campbells: they chose Steele simply as it was the boat’s skipper’s surname).

Local knowledge, however you can acquire it, from older relatives, local history books, websites or local archives and resource centres like Seallam! is an invaluable clue to unlocking your Scottish family history.

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