Reunion: A Search for Ancestors

by Littrell, Ryan

  William and Mary had no interest in coming north, and so the loyal Archibald Campbell, 10th Earl of Argyll, went south to London and handed them the throne of Scotland. Presenting the crown with him was John Dalrymple, a nobleman from the southwestern Lowlands who hoped that Scotland might unify with England, thus progressing at last into the modern era. The chief obstacles to greater Britain’s betterment, Dalrymple was steadfastly convinced, were those Celts of her northwest, with our backward ways and primitive loyalties, our undeserved pride. Only when the Highlanders were brought to heel would England accept Scotland as a nation worthy of her.

  By Loch Leven, far from Dalrymple and London, Alasdair MacIain sat with Achtriachtan, Inverrigan, Dalness and Laroch, and there they set upon their course: They would fight against William and return James to the throne.

  The people of Glen Coe were not Catholic, but as Episcopalians, we held to many of the old Church’s beliefs, far more than did the Puritans in England or the Presbyterians in the Lowlands. Yet religion was a secondary care to us, as it was to most of the Highlanders who were readying their arms against William. Among the clans declaring their support for King James were Catholics, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians alike.

  No, Alasdair and his tacksmen joined the rebellion because William’s reign surely would mean yet more meddling from the south, yet more incursions of English words and cannon, yet more Campbell power. James, on the other hand, had tread even more lightly in the Highlands than had his older brother Charles, and now was pledging his loyalty to the clans. Too, he was a Scottish king in the end, not a Dutch one.

  Perhaps, the people of Glen Coe hoped, a restored King James would show us the richest favour of all. Perhaps we could rest, soon, knowing that our grandchildren’s children would live as Gaels.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE OLD ROAD

  I sat down for breakfast at the Clachaig Inn: Oatmeal and fruit, Café Americano because they didn’t do regular coffee, scrambled eggs and baked beans and sausage. Penny and I had driven into Glencoe last night, in a coming and going drizzle.

  Penny was sleeping in, and so there was room to lay out our map on the table. Last night we’d just followed the road signs, but now I could tell I was sitting near the middle of the glen. And that looming cliff, out the window, had to be Aonach Dubh, and that mountain to its right had to be An t-Sron, but then again the map said this wasn’t a mountain at all—it was only a temporary rise on the way to Bidean nam Bian, which lay above in the distance, or so the map said, on the other side of those mists. And out the other window was another mountain, cleft almost all the way up, and it just had to be Sgorr nam Fiannaidh. The accents around me were Scottish, often, and English, too, but I didn’t hear any Americans or Canadians or Australians.

  Then I looked up and saw Penny walking toward me. The receptionist had come to our door with a message on a sheet of paper, and Penny handed it to me.

  It said: Call Alistair MacDonald.

  So breakfast ended quickly, and Penny snagged some food on her way back to the room. I went to the pay phone, put in some pence, and dialed the number. Ring. He’s probably home. Ring. But if not, I’ll just reach him a little later. Ring.

  “Hello,” he answered. “Alistair MacDonald.”

  “Hello, Mr. MacDonald, this is Ryan Littrell, calling from the Clachaig Inn.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we just got in last night, and I wanted to thank you for responding to my email, you know, and we’re just looking forward to being here for the next week or so.”

  “Maybe you would like to come visit us.”

  “Sure, that would be just great. That would be great. Like I said, we’ll be here for the next week or so, and we don’t have anything planned, so we can stop by anytime. When would be a good day for you?”

  “Now.”

  “Oh, OK, absolutely. It’ll take us a little bit to get ready, but we could be there pretty quickly.”

  I could almost hear him grinning. “No, you should take your time. I don’t mean to rush you. We’ll be here all day. You’ll be going along the old road, then?”

  I didn’t know the old road from the Silk Road, but I said yes.

  He was grinning again. “You’ll be going out the back of the Clachaig, then, and follow that road along the Coe. It will take you across the old bridge into Glencoe village.” He told me just where we could find his and Rosalin’s house.

  All right, OK, good. I hung up, checked for change, didn’t have any, headed back to the room to make sure Penny was all right with the new plan for the day.

  That took me by the front desk, where I heard the receptionist say to someone on the phone, “Aye, good, I’ll pass it on.” Then the receptionist saw me, and motioned me over.

  “Well, wait, Mr. MacDonald,” she said on the phone, “here he is just now.” She handed it to me.

  “Hello, is this Ryan?”

  “Yes, hello.”

  “Lachie MacDonald here. How do you do?”

  “Oh, hello, doing well, how are you?”

  “I’m well, Ryan, thank you. Now, I know you’ve been in contact with my wife Diane about the DNA, and that’s just splendid. We’ll be able to meet this week up in Glencoe, yes?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  “Well, we look forward to it. Now, listen, we have a good friend who lives in Ballachulish, and you might know that’s not far west of the Clachaig there. We spoke to him, oh, just a wee bit ago, and he said he would be happy to take you across to the burial isle in his boat while you’re about. Might you be interested in that?”

  I’m sure I said something that sounded like a grateful yes.

  So, soon, we had a plan. Today was Monday, and Penny and I would meet Lachie’s friend Robert Watt at the loch on Friday morning. Lachie and Diane would see us when we got back to shore.

  And a little while after saying bye to Lachie and hanging up, I stepped outside with Penny. Sgorr nam Fiannaidh began rising right there, right on the other side of those picnic tables, and several more steps beyond that, it was already rocky and steep. In the distance, streams of rainwater were coming down Aonach Dubh and An t-Sron. All around in the air was this cold vapor, in every breath, like I’d just stepped out of a cool shower. Even now, in late October, much of the green in the trees and grass was still there, among all the reds and golds and rock.

  We drove down the old road, with trees beside us all the way. The left side sloped down toward the river, and the right side sloped up into mountains. I tried not to notice that sign depicting falling rocks. The road was narrow enough that I slowed down when a car approached, and so did that other car, and we all gave a thanks-for-that wave. Now the river was just to our left, with red leaves on the banks. We crossed the bridge, slowly, into the village.

  Things were quiet here, and we didn’t see anyone. When we closed the car doors, it sounded loud. The village seemed to be made of one street, along with a few side roads here and there, and it looked like there might be just a few dozen houses, some of them white and some of them stone-gray, with slate shingles and beds of purple and blue flowers beside them, and tended green hedges. Near the center of the street stood the village’s church, its steeple looking out over the highest house around. And on every side, out there, above, were the mountains and the hills.

  We were pretty sure this house was the right one, so we walked up and knocked, and after a moment Rosalin answered the door. “Welcome, welcome, please come in,” she said, smiling.

  Alexander, her and Alistair’s son, was standing behind her, and he shook our hands and said hello. The two of them brought us in, and asked whether we might like to sit in the living room, and offered us something to eat or drink, but no, we said, we’ve already had breakfast, thank you. “Alistair will be by in just a moment,” said Rosalin.

  In the living room, we talked ab
out our flight, about the drive up from Edinburgh to the Clachaig. After several minutes, the door opened and Alistair came in, and he welcomed us and walked over to his chair. He stayed silent while the rest of us finished talking about how the winters had gotten wetter around here recently. Then we were all quiet for a few seconds.

  “I want to be DNA’d,” said Alistair.

  “All right, excellent,” I responded.

  Brundage, my Canadian cousin, had visited Alistair and Rosalin in Glencoe several times, and my New Zealand cousin Colin had come by, too, years before. Alexander, the genealogist in Alistair and Rosalin’s family, had looked into Colin’s family tree, and believed that Colin really was descended from Donald, the younger brother of the 14th chief, just as Colin claimed. And it turned out that my cousin Lachie’s friend, Robert Watt, was married to Rosalin’s sister Jeanette. Robert, who’d be taking us to the burial isle in a few days, was Alistair’s brother-in-law.

  Now Alexander laid out a few documents. He’d spent hundreds of hours uncovering the history of the Glencoe MacDonalds, traveling to libraries and looking through old records. As I sat on the couch, Alistair noticed the book in my hand, the scruffed one with black ink underlines and notes in the margins. It was called The MacDonalds of Glencoe, and I’d been reading it for weeks, trying to find clues.

  “Sander, he has your book,” said Alistair.

  Alexander’s documents showed that he and Alistair were patrilineally descended from Donald MacDonald, who was born in about 1770 in Glencoe, and married Ann MacDonald of Kilmonivaig Parish, about thirty miles to the northeast. This Donald was definitely not the same man as Colin’s ancestor Donald.

  Alexander didn’t know who his ancestor Donald’s parents were, but his family always said that their MacDonald ancestors were in the glen long before 1770. Alexander even had a hunch that Donald might have been descended from the tacksmen of Achtriachtan, in the southeast part of the glen. From his book, I knew that the tacksmen of Glencoe in the 17th and 18th centuries were the chief’s paternal cousins, his lieutenants, and that the tacksmen of Achtriachtan had been placed in charge of more lands and people than any of the others.

  The five of us sat by the fireplace, looking through papers and books while the rain outside came and went, and after an hour or so, Alexander brought in tea and sweetbreads and cookies for us. Alistair talked about his childhood here in the village, about his years working beside the mountains, and his years climbing up into them. A twinkle came to his eye when he spoke of their Glencoe Heritage Trust, their purchase of the old clan lands. Alexander held his cup of tea, cautious, scholarly, leaning in to read old handwriting and then sitting back again, answering each question only as far as it could be rightly answered.

  And Rosalin prodded some memories, and deferred sometimes, and other times said no, not quite. When I asked about her family history, she mentioned that her mother’s maiden name was Rankin. Her family had long been in the glen, too, just like Alistair’s. She was descended from Duncan Rankin, and that name rang a bell. “Aye, well, he was the first one killed, wasn’t he?” she said.

  Among all these notes and records was a list of people named MacDonald who left Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries. The list had been compiled by Clan Donald, and it encompassed MacDonalds from all over Scotland, not just from Glencoe. Penny and I skipped to “McDonald, Angus”—the name of my ancestor, the man who’d been discovered through the Warren County, Kentucky records and the DNA match with Jim McDonald of Houston. But there were so many Angus McDonalds listed here, and not one was tied to Glencoe.

  Still, Penny and I went through the list and wrote down a few candidates, the ones who might be my Angus McDonald, or at least might be related to him. We saw that all four of the Angus McDonalds who fit the bill were men who happened to end up in Virginia before 1775, and that made me wonder. My Angus died in Kentucky in the late 1820s, and many of the people who went to Kentucky in the late 1700s and early 1800s went there from Virginia. Was my Angus one of these MacDonalds who emigrated to Virginia before the American Revolution?

  One of us looked at the clock right about then, and we all realized we’d been sitting here talking for more than five hours—dusk would be coming on in a bit. We said our good-byes and thank-yous, and as Penny and I walked out the door, Alistair mentioned that he’d send away for his cheek swab soon.

  Back at the Clachaig, Penny and I took our seats in the pub, with our pre-dinner pints and all these pages of notes and copied documents. I thought again about Alexander’s suspicion that he and Alistair might be patrilineally descended from the tacksmen of Achtriachtan. Taking what I knew about my cousin Colin’s ancestry, I mapped out the Glencoe MacDonald family tree, or at least the men’s family tree, with the chiefs on the left and the tacksmen’s families on the right:

  Now that I could see Alistair’s possible connection to Colin, I began to wonder whether I was descended from one of the tacksmen’s families myself. Colin and Uncle Chuck had recently tested another thirty DNA markers—beyond the thirty-seven markers already tested—and the two of them only matched on sixty-two out of the combined total of sixty-seven. This gave us even stronger evidence of what the thirty-seven marker results had suggested: Chuck’s line, my line, probably broke off from Colin’s line before the 17th century, but after the 15th. What if the split happened right there, at the top of this chart, where Iain Og gave rise to the chiefs (and Colin) while his younger brother Alexander gave rise to the tacksmen (and Chuck)?

  If my ancestor Angus McDonald emigrated to the American colonies before the Revolutionary War, then he’d fit the profile—I knew from several books that many Highland emigrants to America at the time were tacksmen and their families. Alexander’s book gave hints, too, telling of the younger brother of some tacksman who disappeared from the records, and of sons whose names were known, but whose stories had been lost.

  And for the next few days, Penny and I went to the places in the glen where my Angus might have been born.

  At Achtriachtan, there was just one house, down and away from the main road, and it was beside a loch. The ground sloped up quickly, right at the edge of this field, and now the rocks were jutting up, almost on every side, ascending and ascending until you could barely see them anymore in the sky. Only when the mists passed for a moment would you notice that the crumbling, up there, is what you see near the peaks of cathedrals.

  At Laroch, now part of the town of Ballachulish, you could smell the sea by the old slate quarry, and the river was rushing and pouring under the stone bridge, and tree branches arched up and then almost dipped their ends down into the water. Up above the town, up on Beinn Bhàn, the sun was shining, but farther up and beyond, out on the top of Sgorr Bhàn, the gray was already moving across. Stone fences began at the town’s edge and extended up toward the mountains, showing where one family’s land had once ended, and another’s had begun.

  At Dalness, though, no one seemed to have lived, ever, because it lay so far away from the main road, away from where anyone else was going, and there were no signs of where houses might once have been. These mountains had their own river to rise up from, with stones sticking up at first, dry above the trickle, and then disappearing below when the water built.

  We came to Inverrigan, then, nearly by accident. We were leaving the Glencoe Visitor Centre, a museum run by the National Trust for Scotland, and Alexander’s book said that Inverrigan had been somewhere, not far, to our northwest, and so we walked beyond the little parking lot, toward those trees. There we found a path leading into the woods.

  The path was narrow, and all around were old trees without their leaves, sticking up into the air like spines. We could barely see the sky behind those birds’ nests. Then the way almost cleared for a bit, so that the peak of Sgorr na Cìche lay up there in its fog.

  But soon we were walking into thick woods again, and after a few minutes, we saw the stones. That�
��s when it began raining. That’s when we stopped and stood.

  The stones had once been packed together, making up the walls of someone’s house, but now they were just a foot or two high, with their collapsings all around. Even after all the years, though, they made a rectangle, not much bigger than a living room. Grass grew where the floor had been, and plants and flowers grew around the walls. There was moss in the mortar.

  No one was here, and the water was coming down hard. We walked up to it. In the middle of the house, on the ground, was a wooden cross. Nine trees had been planted outside the house, each protected by an enclosing fence.

  Here, and at Achtriachtan and Laroch and Dalness, I would look over and see nothing, and then look behind me and see nothing, but that just couldn’t be right, because it seemed like someone was watching. Everywhere, the mountains stood over us, and soon they felt like shelter.

  Still, Friday came quickly, and after breakfast we drove to the loch, to where my cousin Lachie had said to go. And there was Robert Watt.

  He smiled, said hello, and shook our hands. “Now, you’ll need these,” he said. “It can get very slippery out there.” He handed us life vests, waterproof overalls, and knee-high rain boots.

  He led us down to the dock, and we stepped into his boat. We were just above the surface of the loch, like it was a pool and we were standing in it. From down here, the mountains reached higher, all around, taking up even more of the sky. The engine started, the mists began coming down from the mountains, the drizzle started again.

  There were three small ports on the isle, I’d heard, one for each of the local clans. We were silent as the boat started moving, and the dock passed behind us. “Robert,” I asked, “are we going to the MacDonald port?”