Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History

‘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.

CHAPTER 3 Scotland’s names (#ulink_80b36531-905b-5912-9a47-f1b61723fdec)

Genealogists rely heavily on names to identify people, and to link them together. Thanks to strong forenaming patterns and the patronymic surname system, Scots’ names are far more likely to identify them in terms of place and family than the names of, say, English or French people.

A theatrical poster of a romantic melodrama, Bonnie Scotland, performed about 1895, shows the idealized image of Scots people that was common around the world.

Variant spellings

In Scots and Gaelic, various groups of letters are interchangeable, or pronounced in non-intuitive ways. In Scots, ‘1’ following ‘a’, ‘o’ or ‘u’ is vocalized as ‘w’, so Falkirk can be rendered Fawkirk and Goldie as Goudie. ‘F’ or ‘v’ at the end of a name might be dropped, so sheriff might be rendered ‘shirra’, whilst ‘d’ was often added, so Norman might become Normand. Gaelic has its own rules of pronunciation and declension. If your family is from a Gaelic-speaking area, it is worth studying the basics, using George McLennan’s Scots Gaelic: an introduction to the basics (Argyll Publishing, 1998) – the added bonus being you will then be able to speak a few words of your own ancestral tongue.

First names

When Gaelic first names were recorded in official documents such as OPRs, attempts were often made to Anglicize them. Being familiar with Homer’s Iliad, session clerks sometimes substituted Gaelic or Norse names with similar-sounding Homeric ones, hence many boys called Aonghas in Gaelic were recorded as Aeneas, and those with the Norse name Ivor became Evander.

Sometimes, several Gaelic names had only one English ‘equivalent’, such as John. Bill Lawson found a Hebridean family with sons called Iain, Shauny, Eoin and Iagan: the registrar recorded all four as John!

There were also names that were commonly substituted not because they were actually linked etymologically but simply because they were vaguely similar. This, as with the spellings, was at the whim of the recording clerk: your ancestors seldom had any say in the matter. Some common variants are as follows, but someone recorded with one variant may easily appear elsewhere under another.

These are generalizations. Local custom was often random, though more eccentric. Bill Lawson’s studies of the Hebrides show that Bethag was Anglicized to Rebecca in Harris, and to Betty or Betsy in Lewis, except for the Lewis parish of Lochs, where the registrar translated Bethag as Sophie. He knows, therefore, that a migrant family from Lewis who used the name Sophie was probably from Lochs.

Girls’ names were often created using their fathers’. Some names, like Nicholas and Christian, were given to girls unaltered: others had ‘-ina’ added. William’s daughter might be Wilhelmina (the GROS website noted the spelling ‘William All-Mina’ in Morton in 1769). Alexander’s daughter became Alexandrina. A real Alexandrina I know of called herself Alice instead, whilst some girls just ended up being nicknamed ‘Ina’. Pity poor Johnina Samuelina, who was named after both her grandfathers!

Grandfather, father and son sharing the same name: three generations of William Meikles, pictured in Falkirk in 1949. The child in the picture grew up to have two sons, the oldest also called William (courtesy of John Meikle).

James and Eleanor Ritchie (born Morgan) from the fishing community of Musselburgh, East Lothian. Her grandson, Eleanor Brown, was named after her! The eleventh son, Eleanor’s parents are said to have run out of boys’ names by the time he came along.

Middle names

Scots rarely used these before the nineteenth century. When the custom spread, Scots sometimes used the names of wealthy patrons or benefactors as middle names, but more normally used existing family forenames and surnames, thereby helping identify the wider ramifications of the family tree. Walter Hooks (1847-1915), pattern-maker of Ardrossan, Ayrshire (see pp. 50-1), for example, called one daughter Mary MacClandish Hooks, the middle name being her mother’s maiden name, and another Sarah Boag Hooks, Sarah Boag having been the full name of his father’s third wife.

Those names were usually bestowed informally: when men appear in records such as tax lists or ships’ manifests with a middle name, this will often be the father’s forename, put there to tell different people apart. John Donald MacDonald and John Neil MacDonald probably weren’t baptized with their middle names – they were just the sons of Donald MacDonald and Neil MacDonald respectively.

Naming patterns

Scots families often followed strict rules about naming children. The usual pattern was as shown on this chart:

Naming patterns. The arrows indicate the person after whom the child was named.

If this practice was followed strictly, and you know the names of all the children in the family, you can work out what the grandparents’ names would have been. Unfortunately, you will seldom know for sure who the eldest son was, and the system was not followed perfectly: in some families, the eldest son was named after the maternal grandfather, and if a child with a particular family name died, a sibling born later might be given the same one.

Problems arose when two grandparents had the same name. If both grandfathers were called Roderick, did you name your second son Roderick, as well as the first? Sometimes no, sometimes yes, though in such cases the second Roderick might be given a completely different nickname.

Naming patterns mean that first names stayed in families, but could migrate down through female lines. Unusual forenames can provide clues to ancestry: the forename Sorley is very rare in Harris, and according to Bill Lawson pretty much everyone with that name is descended one way or another from Sorley MacAulay, one of two MacAulay brothers who settled at Greosabhagh in 1780.

Surnames

When you encounter an ancestral surname, look it up in a reliable surname dictionary. Though far from perfect, the best starting-point is G.F. Black’s The Surnames of Scotland, Their Origin, Meaning, and History (New York Public Library, 1946). Some areas have specialist dictionaries, such as G. Lamb’s Orkney Surnames (Paul Harris Publishing, 1978).

It makes no sense trying to research a family line without seeing if the surname identifies a likely place or origin. You may never be able to trace back all the generations to that place, but at least you will know where the line is likely to have come from. Kinloch or Kinnock, for example, comes from Co. Fife, so a family of that name living in Inverness is likely to have migrated from the south, and any in Glasgow are likely to have moved from the east. Black is good at identifying surnames that can have more than one origin, thus helping you not to make unfounded assumptions.

Derivations

Most Scottish surnames, like so many others in the world, are from the following sources:

From the father (patronymics – see below).

From the occupation (metonymics), such as Mac an t-Saoir, ‘son of the carpenter’, Anglicized as MacIntyre.

From nicknames (sobriquets), such as Cameron, from cam shron, ‘crooked nose’, the nickname of a clan chief of unknown origin.

From places. Some families named from their landholdings have earlier, known ancestry, whilst others come into our ken already identified by their place of residence, and no more, such as:Brodie: from Brodie (Brothac) in Moray (probably Pictish)Colquhoun: from the Barony of Colquhoun, Dumbartonshire, descended from Humphrey de KilpatrickErskine: from the Barony of Erskine, RenfrewForbes: from Forbes, AberdeenInnes: from Innes, Moray, descended from one Berowald in 1160Menzies: from ‘Meyners’, a Lowland surname borne by a family thought to be of Gaelic originUrquhart from Urquhart on the Cromarty Firth.

An extract from The Origin of Surnames and Some Pedigrees, a two-volume scrapbook deposited at the Society of Genealogists, compiled from entries in The Weekly Scotsman (courtesy of the SoG).

Patronymics

‘Mac’ followed by a personal name means ‘son of x’. This patronymic is the commonest form of Scottish surname. MacLaren, for example, means ‘son of Laren’. There are often traditions associated with the original namesake: Laren was an abbot of Achtow in Balquhidder, and the MacArthur’s original Arthur was said to be King Arthur himself: an unlikely tale! But in many cases, the namesake belongs to one of the genuine, ancient, interconnected pedigrees of the Viking and Dalriadan kings (see pedigrees on pp. 196-7 and 200-1), thus turning a mere surname into the key to a vast amount of early genealogical lore.

The Gaelic ‘Mac’ is one of a handful of words common to languages worldwide, that may have been part of the original tongue of our earliest human ancestors. It appears, for example, in native American tongues as make (‘son’); in New Guinea as mak (‘child’); and in Tamil as maka (‘child’). When you address someone as ‘Mac’, you’re using a word that, in all probability, your 180,000 x great-grandparents would have understood. M’ and Mc are contractions of Mac, found in both Ireland and Scotland – it is a myth that Scots only used Mc and the Irish Mac: the spellings are completely interchangeable in both countries.

People might use one or more patronymic. If Angus’s father Donald was the son of Ewan, then he became Angus Mac Donald Mac Ewan. In proper Gaelic, the second and subsequent ‘Mac’s are in the genitive case, so are spelled ‘Mhic’ and pronounced ‘Vic’, and are sometimes transliterated thus too. So, you may find Angus mac Donald mhic Ewan, or Angus mac Donald vic Ewan, all meaning ‘Angus son of Donald son of Ewan’. Throw in some mishearing and Gaelic renderings of the names, and you may have to spend some time deciphering: a rental from Rodel, Harris in 1690 names Angus Mc Coill vic Ewine, which Bill Lawson translates as ‘Angus MacDhomhnaill mhic Eoghainn’, i.e. Angus son of Donald the son of Ewen.

A painting by Swiss artist Johann Heinrich Fuessli (1741-1825) of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, a Scottish name that Shakespeare made famous all round the world.

Sometimes, the system isn’t quite so clear as this, and there are cases where someone’s ‘patronymic’ will actually be the name of the person who brought him up, not his real father: all such cases where a foster-child takes its foster-father’s surname are confusing to genealogists.

Women had patronymics too: the female form of ‘Mac’ was ‘Nic’ or Ni’n’. Angus’s sister Morag may have been recorded as Morag ni’n Donald nic Ewan.

At this point you are probably thinking, ‘This is confusing because MacEwan is a surname, but you are saying here that it can also be simply a description of someone’s father or grandfather. So, was Donald Mac Ewan surnamed MacEwan, or simply the son of someone called Ewan?’

I’m afraid the system didn’t distinguish between the two, mainly because hereditary surnames arose in an entirely informal way in the first place. The MacEwan Clan descends from Ewan of Otter, Co. Argyll, who lived in the thirteenth century. His sons used Mac Ewan as a patronymic that also became a fixed surname. The male-line descendants had their own patronymics – Ian son of Dougal, etc. – and at the end of their list of ancestors they might or might not add their surname. Ian Mac Dougal

The Scottish Life Archive has rich resources for family historians. Many of its photographs depict named individuals. This picture, taken in Falkland, Co. Fife, in 1905, was taken by Andrew Venters in front of his grocery shop. The boy sucking his thumb was ‘W. Anderson’.

Mac Ewan might be Ian son of Dougal of Clan MacEwan clan, or simply someone who, as in our example above, was the grandson of a man called Ewan.

Worse, some patronymic surnames have come to be spelled in a certain way. The Clan MacKenzie are descended from a fourteenth-century Kenneth (Choinnich), who in turn descended from Gilleon na h-Airde, ancestor of the O’Beolan earls of Ross. Unfortunately, some registrars, knowing this and hearing someone saying that their father happened to be called Kenneth, would put them down as ‘MacKenzie’, when they weren’t of the Clan MacKenzie at all. A man whose father was a carpenter might be recorded as the literal translation, MacIntyre, even though he was not a member of the great Clan MacIntyre.

There is no easy solution, but there are some routes through the mire. In general, it’s sensible to assume that people using what appears to be a surname did so because it actually was their surname, particularly if that surname was common in the area. You just have to be prepared for the possibility that your research may reveal this not to have been the case.