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**1938 Observer** · 7 April 2011, 22:14

Re: Newsletter 8th April 2011

Alastair,
I agree with your thoughts regarding clans [ especially their chiefs], their histories and the means they used on gaining/maintaining or disposing of those around them when the political/social or wealth situation changed. It reminds me somewhat [mostly in the mind] of the Holllywood type depiction of Southern gentry and the various outlaws of "The Old West" who are venerated as folk hero's ,when in actual fact many were criminals/blackguards of the worst order. Time, poor reporting and the attempt to show ones ancestors in an heroic or acceptable light has tended to distort history. Why hide the facts? If they were criminals, power hungry or indulged in ethnic cleansing, then that is the way history should be recorded.
We are what we are today through our own endeavours, what/who preceded us is purely history, and it should be recorded honestly and truthfully without bias.

**Alastair** · 7 April 2011, 22:44

Re: Newsletter 8th April 2011

I have no problems with clan chiefs receiving money to defray their expenses in connection with clan affairs or to compensate them for their time. After all we shouldn't expect them to be a charity. But I certainly think more research needs to be done on clans to give us a better understanding of the part they played in Scottish history. Did they provide a positive or negative impact? Right now we really don't know and I don't know of any research that has been done in this area.

Alastair

**Kelly d** · 8 April 2011, 02:17

Re: Newsletter 8th April 2011

Gordon and Allie,

You have hit upon a very good topic. The Clan Chiefs were tough and lived very much like the native American tribes trying to survive.

Allie, I want to thank you for putting these books on PDF. I have downloaded two and will do more to put on my Kindle. Thank you for mentioning Gael's Fire!

**lcnobilus** · 8 April 2011, 11:06

Re: Newsletter 8th April 2011

About clans/septs... April 8 Newsletter

This is a partial report I found on Wikipedia about clans/septs. There are many references at the end of the article which might be helpful in researching individual clan chiefs (see link below).

Lora

Clan membership
The word clann in Scottish Gaelic can mean 'offspring, children, or descendants' Each clan was a large group of people, theoretically an extended family, supposedly descended from one progenitor and all owing allegiance to the clan chief. It also included a large group of loosely-related septs – dependent families - all of whom looked to the clan chief as their head and their protector.
According to the former Lord Lyon, Sir Thomas Innes of Learney, a clan is a community which is distinguished by heraldry and recognised by the Sovereign. Learney considered clans to be a "noble incorporation" because the arms borne by a clan chief are granted or otherwise recognised by the Lord Lyon as an officer of the Crown, thus conferring royal recognition of the entire clan. Clans with recognised chiefs are therefore considered a noble community under Scots law. A group without a chief recognised by the Sovereign, through the Lord Lyon, has no official standing under Scottish law. Claimants to the title of chief are expected to be recognised by the Lord Lyon as the rightful heir to the undifferenced arms of the ancestor of the clan of which the claimant seeks to be recognized as chief. A chief of a clan is the only person who is entitled to bear the undifferenced arms of the ancestral founder of the clan. The clan is considered to be the chief's heritable estate and the chief's Seal of Arms is the seal of the clan as a "noble corporation." Under Scots law the chief is recognised as the head of the clan and serves as the lawful representative of the clan community.
Historically, a clan was made up of everyone who lived on the chief's territory, or on territory of those who owed allegiance to the said chief. Through time, with the constant changes of "clan boundaries", migration or regime changes, clans would be made up of large numbers of members who were unrelated and who bore different surnames. Often those living on a chief's lands would over time adopt the clan surname. A chief could add to his clan by adopting other families, and also had the legal right to outlaw anyone from his clan, including members of his own family. Today, anyone who has the chief's surname is automatically considered to be a member of the chief's clan. Also, anyone who offers allegiance to a chief becomes a member of the chief's clan, unless the chief decides not to accept that person's allegiance. The only rule is that it is up to the chief whom he may decide to accept as a member of his clan.
Clan membership goes through the surname. It does not pass through a married woman who has taken her husband's surname, and then on to her children. Children who take their father's surname are part of their father's clan and not their mother's. However, there have been several cases where a descendant through the maternal line has changed their surname in order to claim the chiefship of a clan, such as the late chief of the Clan MacLeod who was born John Wolridge-Gordon and changed his name to the maiden name of his maternal grandmother in order to claim the chiefship of the MacLeods. Today clans may have lists of septs. Septs are surnames, families or clans which historically, currently or for whatever reason the chief chooses, are associated with that clan. There is no official list of clan septs, and the decision of what septs a clan has is left up to the clan itself. Confusingly sept names can be shared by more than one clan, and it may up to the individual to use his or her family history or genealogy to find the correct clan they are associated with.
Several clan societies have been granted coats of arms. In such cases, these arms are differenced from the chief's, much like a clan armiger. The former Lord Lyon King of Arms, Thomas Innes of Learney stated that such societies, according to the Law of Arms, are considered an "indeterminate cadet."
[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_clan]

**Rick** · 10 April 2011, 16:53

Re: Newsletter 8th April 2011

It's any interesting discussion on our views of the clans. I think there are several influences at play that may fnally be sorting themselves out. First, most of us who are two or three generations removed from Scotland are quite misinformed about the actual history and structure of the country. We therefore tend to equate highlands history with all of Scottish history, resulting in at best a fuzzy understanding of the economic and cultural contributions of the lowlands, the Enlightenment and factors that influenced the flow of emigration. Second, there is some sort of primal human compulsion to be identified as a member of a tribe. This may come from being swallowed up in complex modern societies or from a need to have distinct history, or even from the modern thirst to be a victim of something or other, but whatever the source, I find it troublesome. Finally, we would all love to subscribe to the highland myth because it is so simple and romantic. We see the same tendancy in North America with respect to romantic and completely nonsensical ideas about aboriginal people living in harmony with nature and each other before colonial contact. Sadly, these simplistic and politically correct approaches to history deprive us of the real richness and understanding that we could have. In that regard, I do think some progress is being made in the popular literature, and must agree with Alastair that the Scottish Studies Foundation has more or less dropped the ball on that score. (I'm not sure the BC equivalent is doing much better, but fully agree that academia should not have full custody of our common heritage.)

**Alastair** · 11 April 2011, 15:21

Re: Newsletter 8th April 2011

The Highlands tend to get all the romance as it were. Thing is that most of the really great contributions that Scots made came from the central area of Scotland and the Borders. Like often quoted are the number of US Presidents that have a Scottish heritage. If you examine the list most are actually of Scots-Irish heritage. These were Scots who moved to Ulster to settle but most of them came from the Borders and central Scotland.

The very first publication I put up on the site was "The General History of the Highlands, the Highland Clans and the Highland Regiments". Unlike subsequent books I actually divided that up on the site. The General History of the Highlands became the start of my History section. The Highland Clans was the basis of my Clans section and the Highland Regiments became the Scottish Regiments section. I also extracted the very large account of Bonnie Prince Charlie into a section on its own.

It was through this 6 volume publication that I first found accounts of brutal treatment of the clans by other clans. One clan found another clan hiding in a cave and they set fires which killed all the men, women and children with not one survivor.

There is no doubt that clan members did amazing things at home and abroad but often, but not always, these were individual efforts. I have been trying to find papers on what the Clans contributed to Scotland. There is no doubt that in the army they did a tremedous job and most of the Highland regiments were recruited from individual clans. However while these regiments were fighting all over the world their homes were being destroyed by the clan chiefs so they could raise sheep. Very few clans have any reasonable record around this time and some were brutal in the extreme and all of this led to the so called Highland Clearances.

I've recently been working on biographies of individuals who did amazing things and find that almost all of them were not brought up in the Highlands.

Robert Burns was brought up in Ayr and spent almost his entire life outside the Highlands. James Watt actually spent a good part of his time in England as did most of our major engineers and pretty well all of them were born and brought up outside the Highlands.

The Highlands and Islands are a very beautiful part of Scotland and contain many of the old romantic castles. That means it is quitre natural for people to want to go there. Also due to the Highland Clearances many of the emigrants to other parts of the world came from there. This simply means when doing genealogy you find your roots going back there.

It's only by reading extensively that you start to get some idea of how people lived in the old days in the Highlands. That is why I wish that clan accounts would deal more with the extended family and clan rather than concentrating on the principal clan chiefs.

For example I spent time in the lands of Clan MacThomas and also Clan MacPherson. I drove around the area trying to get a sense of how the clans might have lived in the old days and indeed where they might have had their homes. I really couldn't find anything. This is partly why I've published some books of wee areas of the Highlands to try and get a sense of how they lived their lives. One book I put up recently stated that almost all the homes have now gone and the names of the places around have now been mostly forgotten. In that book it mentioned that one of the old homes had been preserved and was the home of the shepherd. The Shepherd was interested in knowing the names of places in the area but could find no-one with any knoweldge of the area. Eventually an old resident of the area was found in the South of Scotland and he was brought back and he was able to name all the rivers, hills, places, etc. and this has now been recorded in the Ordinance Survey of Scotland maps. Had it not been for finding this old resident all that information would be lost to us.

There is also a dearth of information on how ordinary people lived in the old Clan days. With the continued wars and clan feuds you wonder how they could have survived. We do get clues on how they lived from a variety of accounts but these accounts are mostly 18th century and beyond accounts with very few into the 17th or earlier centuries. You do get clues by reading various accounts such as one about the area of Arbroath and Arbroath abbey. There you learn that the people were simple property. Should the owner of the land wish to sell of part of his land then the people went with it. They were given no choice in the matter.

Then another fragment tells us of the thick woods in the Highlands and how strangers could get lost. There is all too little information about those times and all too little as to the cutting down of these forrests. Considering that most of the Highlands have been denuded of trees there must have been a whole industry in cutting them down but there is almost no account of this.

And so there is much we still don't know of Highland life and certainly before the 17th century. In my view this can only be discovered by doing extensive research and this is where the Universites should play their part. They should encourage their students to do research into this whole area and when they eventually publish their papers they need some way to ensure they get the widest possible publicity and certainly outside the University system.

When it comes to Native Indian life in North America we do know that the Native Indians did live close to the land and how else could they have survived but to be close to it. One account I read about Scots settling in Florida mention that the Scots (and they were Highland Scots) got on well with the local native tribe. The Chief of the Tribe was quoted as saying he got on well with the Scots as they knww how to look after the land and the wild life. For example, they didn't shoot nursing deers as this ensured the continued strength of the species for future generations. He commented that all the other settlers would kill anything they could without any consideration of future resources.

The chief eventually moved his tribe further south but it is recorded they couldn't trace what happened to them.

I do continue to search out information on the early days in Scotland and this is in part why I've spent time providing information on early settlement in Canada and the USA. I want to preserve and make available these accounts for future generatations.

For example I was aware of sod huts but could only imagine the misery of living in such. However through more reading I found that these sod huts could actually be very pleasant places to live, warm in the winter and cool in the summer. I actually have an old black and white video of the building of a sod house on the site.

The opening up of libraries for the scanning of books into the Internet Archive has been a boon for resarchers. I do make extensive use of such in my own research. Mind you it takes some skill to find books on various topics. Such an example if my search for information on Scots in the Netherlands. At the end of the day quite by chance I did find such information but it was the Scots in a town in the Netherlands. In the title and key words there was no mention of the Netherlands. It's also like a friend of mine noted. He was looking for information the Scots-American Land Company but could find nothing. It was while mentioning this to a friend that the friend suggested he look for the Scotch-American Land Company and there he hit pay dirt.

We forget that in the old days Scotch were the people and it's only since the major promotion of Scotch Whisky that we have all been told Scotch is the whisky and Scots are the people. Little things like that can trip up the researcher.

Anyway... I will continue to seek out further information on clans and the clans people and bring you anything I find.

Alastair

**1938 Observer** · 11 April 2011, 23:49

Re: Newsletter 8th April 2011

A 'sod house' would certainly have been quite an experience, I suppose they may have been the fore-runner of 'black houses' ?
Here are a couple of interesting 'black house' photographs.

http://special.st-andrews.ac.uk/sasp...lcyI7fQ==&pg=7

http://special.st-andrews.ac.uk/sasp...cyI7fQ==&pg=10

There is a facility at the link to show an enlarged photograph

information is from St. Andrews Library Photographic Collection:cool:

**Alastair** · 12 April 2011, 11:17

Re: Newsletter 8th April 2011

The videos I have are at http://www.electricscotland.com/videos/index.htm

I think the Black Houses came about as there was little wood but plenty of stones. In the Orkneys and Shetlands you can see very old stone settlements of around 5,000 years ago.

Alastair

**Rick** · 14 April 2011, 22:37

Re: Newsletter 8th April 2011

This has been a very interesting discussion, and one I'll come back to from time to time. The sod houses were quite common during early settlement of the Canadian plains where other building materials were scarce. They were, as Alastair notes, not too dreadful and could be put up quite quickly with a minimum of skill, tools and other materials that would have been costly to acquire and transport. However, they were never intended to be more than temporary dwellings until a real house could be put up, or the farming enterprise failed. The black houses never "caught on" in those areas tho' they might have been the logical next step in some areas where glaciation had left large deposits of field stone. Instead, there were quite a number of grand mortared fieldstone houses, barns and public buildings erected, mostly by Scots, in those areas. As an example, here's the house built my great-grandparents in southeastern Saskatchewan on the farm they called "Smithfield". If all goes well, I'll be retiring there before too long!

Attached Files

**Alastair** · 14 April 2011, 23:40

Re: Newsletter 8th April 2011

Certainly looks like a very solid house Rick. I put up a book called "The MacGregors" which details the building of a log cabin and then later building a stone house. The book was written as a novel but it was all based on facts. The author wrote it to try and preserve some of the old history. He was brought up in Bruce County in Ontario and the information for it came from his parents and grandparents.

If you'd like to read the book you can find it at http://www.electricscotland.com/history/mcgregors/

Alastair

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Newsletter 8th April 2011

Newsletter 8th April 2011

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