Stories in Family History

Bridgend Hotel, Islay, Scotland

Do stories grab you? Perhaps you are a reader of fiction but even if you rarely open a book, stories can still catch your attention. Stories can include the latest office gossip, riveting local, national or international news or statements of claim or intent. Stories and people have been linked since early history.

Stories can be a gateway to family history. They were in my case. My first forays into genealogical research flowed from the stories that I heard growing up. Well, that and the questions I asked my family. Early on, most of the questions were to my mother because I started with her line but, strangely enough, it was my father who told me that her Gilchrist line came from Islay.

How did he know that? I never asked while I had the chance. (Those missed opportunities seem to happen a lot with family historians.) Perhaps he learned that from my great aunt, Peg Gilchrist. Auntie Peg researched family history way back in the days before computers. I have no idea when she started but she had the advantage of being two generations closer to our Scottish roots than me. It was likely the saga of the trek from Scotland to Ontario was still in living memory even if the family had moved further west by the time that Auntie Peg must have started her research.

That was back when queries went out by snail mail. I can remember the days of sending out mail queries and hoping for replies. It must have been even harder back when Auntie Peg started, perhaps in the 1950's or '60s, when fewer information repositories were set up with the genealogist in mind. Still, she was able to progress from armchair research to the more exciting activity of visiting ancestral places. In fact, I have a photo of the Bridgend Hotel on Islay where she stayed.

Huh, that's probably the answer to how my Dad knew that my Mum's Gilchrists came from Islay. He would have remembered stories about Auntie Peg's visit to Islay even if he didn't remember details about her research. When I first visited Islay, I made sure to follow in her footsteps and made arrangements to stay at the Bridgend Hotel like she had. At least I knew that about her genealogy trip, that picture (the one at to the right) and a half page write up about the Gilchrist family are the only parts of her research that I have found. Too bad there weren't any stories about where the rest of her research papers went. 

DNA Update

For me, DNA hasn't led to any of those wonderful revelations that are unveiled on shows like Finding Your Roots. But my knowledge of genetic genealogy is increasing and lately I have made some progress with using matches to further my genealogical research.

One thing I am getting a lot of experience with is endogamy. It seems that it proliferates in much of the ancestry that I research.I received a recent email about a match related to a supposed 2nd to 4th cousin match. It looked promising but any match would be back nine generations according to the paper trail. I think I need to look into this further. The email did show some possible connections with the old country which should be helpful.

That's not the only line where endogamy confuses things. The ancestral lines I am tracing go back to some isolated groups where there were limited possibilities when it came to a mate (or mates); groups such as Colonial Americans, and Scots from the Western Isles. My ancestor hunt also includes Acadians which I suspect have their share of intermarriage. Another group that may have been prone to marrying back into a common gene pool were English nonconformists. There are repetitions of the surnames, Strange, Devonshire and Rolls in the nonconformist lineages I pursue. But my DNA news isn't all about the strange matches that endogamy brings.

DNA Facebook groups were a bit of a bust for my lines at first. Recently, my name actually showed up as a GEDmatch match on a post on the Irish DNA Registry on Facebook. There were Irish locations listed! Can this be the break that helps me get my Cavanagh family out of London back to where they came from? That remains to be seen.

The McPhees - Scots or French?

Lochaber on the west coast of Scotland, possible place of origin for the McPhee clan

Decades ago, I became aware of the conundrum that was the McPhee family. Visits to the family farm in River Bourgeois happened often in this large family. When I was there, the talk was in English and French. I remember thinking it was odd that the family name was so Scottish when they were in such a French part of Cape Breton. At the time I supposed that some time in the mid 1800s, a lone male McPhee wandered into that part of Nova Scotia, married an Acadian woman and had been assimilated. 

Until last week, my research didn't go very far into the McPhee line. It was then that I received an email about one of the DNA kits I manage. The email mentioned a 2nd to 4th cousin match with a connection to Scotland. Intrigued, I got out the bits and pieces I had and spent a few nights on Ancestry. Turns out my theory of the assimilated lone male McPhee in the mid 1800s was a bit off the mark.  

The McPhee line I am researching goes back in River Bourgeois and other parts of Isle Madame in Cape Breton for four generations. That's many generations of assimilation into Acadian/French culture and there are names in that line like Louis and Regis that fit into the French mindset. Before the move to Cape Breton, the fifth generation back appears to have been started by John McPhee who was born in Quebec around 1756. 

It's all very interesting but doesn't really answer the question of why this French family had the Scottish surname of McPhee. The timing of John McPhee's birth in Quebec is suggestive. 1756 was just a few years after some momentous upheavals in both the Acadian and Scottish worlds. 

1755 was the year of the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia but the Acadians in Cape Breton were not driven from Isle Madame. In fact, Acadians came from outside the community to settle there.* Ten years prior to the disruption of the Acadians, the Scots, particularly the Highland Scots, had gone through a major upheaval of their own, when Bonnie Prince Charlie and his supporters were defeated at Culloden. There were a number of McPhees named in the muster rolls of Prince Charles' army. Could the father of John McPhee, born in 1756 in Quebec, be one of the men who had fled from Scotland as they were hunted down by Cumberland's army after the defeat?#

 River Bourgeois (Inlet) Lighthouse

There are many things to speculate about as my research uncovers information about this McPhee line and I hope to find many more answers. The questions keep coming, not the least of which why there is a 2nd to 4th cousin DNA match leading back to Scotland when I can count 8 to 9 generations of this particular McPhee line in Canada. Is this a case of more endogamy in action?

Sources:

*Vernon, C.W. Cape Breton Canada at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (1902). Global Heritage Press Inc, Campbellville, Ontario, 2006

#Livingsone, Alastair, Christian W.H. Aikan, Betty Stuart Hart. No Quarter Given: The Muster Roll of Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s Army, 1745 – 46. Neil Wilson Publishing Ltd. Glasgow, 2001

  

Images:

By Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right, CC BY-SA 3.0, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13290738

By Dennis Jarvis from Halifax, Canada - DGJ_4958 - River Bourgeois (Inlet) LighthouseUploaded by X-Weinzar, CC BY-SA 2.0, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18631638