Reunion: A Search for Ancestors

by Littrell, Ryan

  And there was his grin. It wasn’t the self-conscious kind: It would come up from inside him whenever the occasion for a smile arose, which for him was most of the time.

  That smile might surprise anyone who knew where he came from. As a child, he had to live with another family for a while because there wasn’t enough for him and his brothers and sisters, and he had to quit school after 8th grade to work in a coalmine. Even when he was a young man, his children would wake up on Christmas morning to find that their only gifts were ripe oranges, one for each of them, placed in their stockings. But he always knew he was lucky, because he had a love that never went away, and the assurance that he never left his beliefs, and some chances to pass down what matters, and a lot of graduations.

  He was here for so long that he passed away just a year before his daughter, my grandma. After the two of them were gone, I still respected their suspicions, their boredom with the dead. But now I’d seen Braveheart, and I’d learned from those Clans and Tartans books. And now I’d found an accomplice—my mom. We began entertaining the suspicion that we were MacDonalds, despite that little hang-up about our family records only going back to the late 1800s.

  We decided to try out the Scottish Highland revival.

  We made our way to the Highland Games in Springfield, Illinois, where we listened to the bagpipers and watched big guys in kilts do the caber toss and the Scottish hammer throw. We watched the girls do Highland dancing. We went up to the Clan Donald tent and picked up a pamphlet without letting on just who we were. A guy said something in Gaelic over the loudspeaker, and nobody knew what it meant, but it was a big hit anyway. Mom bought a bumper sticker that read, “Have you hugged a Scot today?” Beer was involved, which might explain why my memories are hazy, but I remember that I found a miniature British flag to buy, just for fun, and the man selling it called it “the limey.”

  Because just as David needed Goliath, just as Luke Skywalker needed the Dark Side of the Force, a pro-Celtic movement has to be anti-English. The Englishman will never win at this game: He’s either an aristocratic snob, or a jackass who beats up people at soccer matches. He’s either a polite wimp, or is always aiming to prey and conquer. He’s everything that the Celt isn’t—cold and stale rather than warm and creative, intellectual rather than vital, pompous rather than down-to-earth, backstabber rather than straight shooter.

  But it’s not enough, at the Highland Games in Springfield, Illinois, to content ourselves with anti-English jabs. No, we also have our clan rivalries to be responsible for. Later in the day, a man named Campbell got up to do the caber toss, and—again, just for fun—I booed. I did it softly enough that Mr. Campbell couldn’t hear me, but loudly enough that the couple standing next to me could. They gave me a knowing look and asked which clan I was from. When I gave the answer, they replied, “Ah yes, we know all about the MacDonalds and the Campbells.”

  It was the most famous bad blood in Scottish history. The two clans were enemies for centuries, fighting for control of much of the Highlands. By now, the details of this civil war have mostly been forgotten, replaced by a vague sense of distrust, even among those who take it seriously. For others, it’s so far back in the past that the only reason worth mentioning it is to get an easy laugh. The Economist, in a book review, showed a hamburger fighting a can of soup.

  One event, though, is still remembered, and has come to crystallize the MacDonald-Campbell grudge in the minds of many people: In February 1692, in what’s become known as the “Massacre of Glencoe,” British government troops under the command of a Robert Campbell fell upon the people of Glencoe, the smallest branch of the MacDonalds. The troops had arrived in Glencoe about two weeks earlier, and the MacDonalds had taken them in, giving them all hospitality—shelter, food and drink. Men, women and children were slaughtered in the middle of the night or froze to death as they tried to escape. A song by Jim McLean tells the story:

  They came in a blizzard, we offered them heat,

  A roof o’er their heads, dry shoes for their feet,

  We wined them and dined them, they ate of our meat,

  And they slept in the house of MacDonald.

  Oh, cruel is the snow that sweeps Glencoe

  And covers the grave o’ Donald,

  Oh, cruel was the foe that raped Glencoe

  And murdered the house of MacDonald.

  Most of the troops weren’t Campbells, and the orders came from the British king and his Scottish officials rather than a Campbell chief, but it’s mostly come to be seen as a massacre of “the MacDonalds” by “the Campbells.” At the reception desk at the Clachaig Inn, a bed and breakfast in Glencoe, there’s a sign that reads: “No hawkers or Campbells.”

  As evening approached, Mom and I left the Highland Games with our bumper sticker, our miniature flag, and a new CD of bagpipe music. And from time to time over the next few years, those bagpipes would fill up my apartment, and websites would show me tartan kilts and tell Gaelic legends.

  Still, the Highlands were hypothetical, because my McDonald family tree could only say this:

  Then, one weekend, Mom and Aunt Donna were going through some boxes that had been at Great-grandpa Lee’s house. When they opened one of the boxes, they saw black and white pictures and old newspaper cut outs, wedged in next to each other, stacked on top of one another.

  Here was Grandma as a girl, smiling with Shirley Temple curls, sitting at her desk like the other kids, and her teacher was standing erect in the back, with the cursive on the blackboards all around, and a profile of George Washington hung on the wall. Here was Great-grandpa Lee as a young man, standing in front of the little church where his parents had gotten married. Here was a cutout from the Chatham Clarion: “Mr. and Mrs. William H. McDonald of Chatham will mark their 60th wedding anniversary Thursday. They have lived in Chatham for 43 years and are the parents of eight children, all living. They also have 14 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.”

  And down in that box, tucked in with the photos and newspaper clippings, someone had left a white envelope. Mom and Aunt Donna pulled it out. There was no writing on the envelope—no names, no scribbles, no return address.

  But inside it was a letter.

  CHAPTER 3

  OL’ SCOTTY

  The handwriting was unknown, and the letter was unsigned, but it listed Will and Linnie and their birth dates and death dates, and it said that Linnie’s parents were Thomas and Lucy Hagan. And there, at the top, it said that Will’s parents were William Duncan McDonald (1855-1935) and Georgianna “Anna” Wilson (1854-1920). Then it said that Georgianna Wilson’s father was William Wilson, and that William Duncan McDonald’s parents were Hiram McDonald and Nancy Buchanan.

  Mom knew I was coming home in a few weeks for Christmas, so she waited to show me the letter. I’d graduated from law school a year before, and I was working as a lawyer in New York. This was the first time my girlfriend Penny, a New Yorker, was coming back to Chatham to meet the family. We had all the introductions, and then the we-really-like-her, and the I-really-like-them.

  It was at the end of the trip when Mom sat with Penny and me and showed us the old letter. When I first saw it, I said “William Duncan McDonald” and “Georgianna Wilson” silently to myself, as if I’d just been introduced to them and wanted to make sure not to forget their names. Since I’d never known anything about them, they’d been these mystery placeholders on the family tree. Now, with their names and a few dates, they somehow seemed more real to me.

  So my McDonald family tree suddenly looked like this:

  But who were the parents of Hiram McDonald? I started with the serious researcher’s most time-tested method—the Google search. I found several Hiram McDonalds, but none of them could have been my Hiram, based on their dates, where they lived and whom they married.

  Still, I knew that Great-grandpa Lee’s family was f
rom Missouri, and I wondered whether any Missouri records were online. At Ancestry.com, I typed in my great-great-great-great-grandma Nancy Buchanan’s name, and within a few seconds, I was looking at a page showing that she married Hiram McDonald on April 7, 1836 in Lincoln County.

  I was surprised to find out that Hiram and Nancy were in Missouri that early. But I wasn’t surprised to find that Lincoln County is just south of Pike County, where their great-grandson, my great-grandpa Lee, was born.

  Then I saw that census records were available, too, and they could be searched by name. Somehow, I trusted whoever had written that letter sitting at the bottom of the box, but these census entries might be able to confirm what the letter said—or maybe tell a different story altogether.

  I started with the 1900 census; I knew for sure that Will and Linnie were Great-grandpa Lee’s parents, and I knew they’d gotten married in 1898, so the 1900 census would be the first one that would list them together as a household. I typed in Will’s name, and in an instant I was looking at an image of the original census page, ink smudges and all. There they were, about halfway down the page: William and Linnie McDonald, living in Pike County.

  And just two doors down were William McDonald, born in August 1855, and Annie McDonald, born in November 1854. The names and dates matched up with what the letter said about Will’s parents, William Duncan McDonald and Georgianna “Anna” Wilson. That’s what you’d expect of a young couple, just starting out—they’d be living next to family.

  I went back ten years, but found out that most of the 1890 census records had been destroyed by fire. So I went further back, to 1880, and there I found William and Georgia McDonald in Pike County, both aged twenty-five, with a young son named William. This proved the letter right: Will, the little boy in 1880, was the son of William and Georgianna McDonald.

  Then, another ten years back, in the 1870 census, I found a fifteen-year-old named Duncan McDonald in Lincoln County. This had to be my William Duncan, born in 1855. The names of his parents? Hiram and Nancy McDonald.

  So the census records proved what Mom and Aunt Donna found in that box: My great-great-grandpa Will really was the son of William Duncan and Georgianna, and William Duncan really was the son of Hiram and Nancy. Now that I thought about it, I could have uncovered these things all along, just through census records.

  But would those records reveal Hiram’s parents?

  I knew that Hiram was in Lincoln County by 1836, when he married Nancy and the two of them started a household. I hoped that I could find his parents by finding Hiram listed in their household in the pre-1840 censuses, but it turned out that in those censuses, the census takers only asked for the name of the head of the household, so Hiram couldn’t be found there.

  The online 1850-1880 censuses, though, asked people which state or country they were born in. By knowing where Hiram was born, I’d at least be able to narrow the search for his parents to one state or country—maybe Scotland or Ireland.

  I looked, and noticed something strange: In 1850, Hiram told the census taker that he’d been born in Kentucky, but in the 1860, 1870 and 1880 censuses, he said Ohio. Had there been some Ohio-Kentucky border dispute I was unaware of? Or had someone else in the household talked to the census taker, giving the wrong answer for some reason?

  Fortunately, the 1880 census asked people where their parents had been born, and here Hiram (or someone else) said that his parents had been born in Kentucky. But from the census records, I knew that Hiram was born in about 1807, so his parents were probably born before the end of the Revolutionary War—probably too early to have been in Kentucky or Ohio already.

  Then I noticed something even stranger: In the 1860, 1870 and 1880 censuses, the family name was given as McDonald, but in the 1850 census, it was McDaniel. Soon I found a family tree at Rootsweb.com that mentioned Hiram and Nancy’s daughter Mary, calling her Mary McDaniel, and giving Hiram’s last name as MackDaniel. Did Hiram change his name from McDaniel to McDonald? Had my family been McDaniels all this time, without knowing it?

  I’d heard of immigrants changing their names upon arriving in America, and I had no reason to think that the same thing couldn’t have happened in 19th century Missouri. According to some websites, the name McDaniel was simply another version of the Scottish name McDonald, but according to The Dictionary of American Family Names, McDaniel was a version of the Irish name McDonnell.

  The more I searched, the less I knew.

  Maybe other people out there had their own family records that mentioned Hiram. But how could I get in contact with them, if they even existed? I typed “Lincoln County Missouri genealogy” into Google and found the Lincoln County GenWeb site, part of the US GenWeb Project. It seemed to have everything you might need if you had Lincoln County ancestors—a message board, old maps, tips on how to find marriages and deaths and burials. And here was a Surname Registry, where anyone interested in a particular family could leave their name and email address. Under “McDonald,” I found a man named Ray Bell.

  I decided to give it a shot. I emailed him what I knew about Hiram, and a few days later I got a response. His McDonalds/McDaniels weren’t related to mine, but he’d learned a little about Hiram, and had kept some notes just in case. He didn’t know who Hiram’s parents were, but he knew Hiram had a brother named Thomas, who married Nancy Presley in Lincoln County in 1839.

  Now that I knew a little more, I felt comfortable posting a query about Hiram and his brother Thomas on Internet message boards, and I waited again. Within a day, I got a response. A man named Dennis Korinek told me that he was descended from Nancy Presley, not through her marriage to Thomas, but through her second marriage.

  Dennis didn’t know anything about Hiram and Thomas’ parents, but at least his family had passed down some sense of what Thomas was like. According to a letter written by Thomas’ great-grandson, “‘Scotty’ McDonald was hunted by the law from one end of Missouri to the other. My mother told me once that her mother, Naomi, told her that once a posse almost caught McDonald. But he escaped by running outside and jumping into a horse trough, leaving only his nose sticking out of the water so he could breathe. This happened at night, and the posse searched the house and barn. But never thought of looking in the horse trough.”

  When I told Mom about ol’ Scotty, she was quiet for a second and then said, “You know, that’s funny, I just remembered that Grandpa used to talk about how people in his family would run around with Jesse James.” As soon as she said that, I remembered that Great-grandpa Lee had told me the same thing when I was a little boy. Even though he didn’t think family history mattered much, that rule apparently didn’t apply to the part about cavorting with famous killers.

  And now I could imagine getting an email that revealed Hiram’s origins, because if one perfect stranger knew a family story about a posse and a horse trough, then there just had to be another who knew an older story.

  While I waited, I tried one new thing. I’d already searched for Hiram and Nancy on Ancestry.com and Google, but maybe there was some record out there that gave their surname without listing their first names. Soon I found myself back at the Lincoln County GenWeb site, where I saw this transcription of a gravestone at the Bryant Creek Cemetery:

  H. McDONALD - b: Nov. 12, 1806; d: Oct. 17, 1882

  M. McDONALD - b: Dec. 16, 1818; d: July 17, 1910

  The letter M in this “M. McDonald” almost made me click away, but then I saw that these people had to be Hiram and Nancy. The 1900 census had asked for the month and year of a person’s birth, and in that census Nancy had said December 1818. The transcriber of this gravestone had simply mistaken an N for an M.

  So now I knew exactly when Hiram and Nancy were born, and exactly when they died. Their gravestone also showed that they went by McDonald, not McDaniel, so if my ancestors had once been McDaniels, the switch happened prior to Hiram.

  All right then. If
there were some record, somewhere, that referenced a Hiram McDonald/McDaniel who was born on November 12, 1806 and died on October 17, 1882, then I’d know that this was my Hiram, and that might lead me to his family.

  It might. And over the next few months, I got used to that might. Someone might email me to say who Hiram’s parents were. A new search on Google or Ancestry.com or Familysearch.org might reveal a new clue. I’d known from the beginning that this would probably take time, and I’d never expected it to be easy, but I’d hoped to uncover my McDonald ancestors before the upcoming family trip.

  To Scotland.

  Penny and I were getting married, and we’d settled on a church outside of Edinburgh, with a honeymoon up in the Highlands. Rather than have a big wedding in New York or Chatham, we’d decided to, ahem, channel our resources in a different way—keep things small, and far off. Since none of our family or friends had been to Scotland, the escape would be part of the experience.

  Although no one from my dad’s side of the family would be able to make it, most of my mom’s family would be there, and they were getting ready, thinking about the places they’d see. There were whispers of kilt buying and rumors of haggis eating. I still wasn’t sure about our supposed connection to Clan Donald, but I’d been overruled; all the men in the family would be wearing MacDonald tartan ties on the big day, except those of us in the wedding party. Peggy, Grandma’s little sister, would be wearing a MacDonald tartan sash.

  As Penny and I boarded the plane, our carry-on luggage was a long, white dress. People around us gave smiling glances, and a few congratulations, as a flight attendant found a closet to hang the dress in. We buckled our seatbelts and checked our phones to make sure there weren’t any more emails to worry about. The groomsmen’s suits were ready to be picked up, and the bridesmaids knew when to show up at Angus Gordon Hairdressing, and the bagpiper knew which songs to play. Our bed-and-breakfasts in the Highlands were all booked.