Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History. Anthony Adolph

is an American website providing copious links to Scottish-interest sites, including travel, cooking, clans and history. The genealogy links page is worth exploring.

      Seallam!

       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.

       CHAPTER 3 Scotland’s names

       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,