Don, from Ohio, was visiting his ancestors’ lands in Strathnaver. Basu asked him why he’d decided to come here, and Don responded: “Because this is where I’m from. Not physically. I didn’t physically come from here, I wasn’t physically born here, but this is where I’m from, if you can understand that….so that not only am I proud of being a Scot because of my family, but I’m proud of being a Scot because of this. This is where they lived. Because of the battles and that kind of thing that the clan had fought. I’m part of that clan. That’s who I am.”
And Brenda, from Ontario, was traveling through the isles where her ancestors might have lived. Her husband and daughter had stayed behind, so that she could make the trip on her own. Brenda told Basu, “I just feel so lucky to be here. And this is the real me. At home, I mean of course that’s the real me—don’t get me wrong—and I love my family and my life and I’m very proud of my life at home. But this is where…I don’t want to say this is where my heart is. It goes deeper. My heart is with my child and my husband….My soul is here. It’s deeper. It’s like no one can take that away.”
After just two days on the Isle of Skye, a few voices in me were starting to sound like Don and Brenda, and the next morning, Penny and I set off for the Clan Donald Centre, just a short drive down the road to the south. On one of the old estates of the MacDonalds of Sleat, looking out over the bay to the mainland, it has a museum and library devoted to the clan, and the ruins of the castle where some of Lord Godfrey’s portraited ancestors once lived.
First up was the restaurant, for an early lunch. Sitting at a window table, we gazed at the clan crests and mottos displayed like banners above us, official seals of past kingdoms: MacDonnell of Antrim, MacDonald of Ardnamurchan, of Clanranald, of Dunivaig, Glencoe, Glengarry, Keppoch, Sleat. While I bit into my sandwich, Penny started speculating. “I wonder which branch your family’s from.”
I looked up at the crests and Latin mottos and said, “Who knows?” If I deserved a clan crest, it was for the McDonalds of Right Outside Troy, Missouri.
“I know,” she said. Silence for a few more moments, except for my munching. “But still. I just have a feeling it might be Keppoch, for some reason.”
Now we walked down a path to the museum and followed the MacDonald story: The Viking invasions, the rise of Somerled and the Lords of the Isles, the battles against other clans and against the Scottish and English crowns, the government’s massacre of the MacDonalds of Glencoe, the rebellion of 1745, and then the 18th and 19th century dispersals of Highland people all around the globe, known as the Highland Clearances.
There were weapons, poems, jewelry, paintings. I reminded myself that my ancestors might have been part of all of this, but as we looked at the acre of castle ruins, with mountains in the distance, I thought of Grandma and Grandpa’s little house back in Chatham, with its flat, mowed lawn surrounded by prairie to the horizon.
At the museum, we’d come across a sign advertising a lecture to be given that afternoon by a man named Bryan Sykes. He was a geneticist at Oxford, and his talk would explore how DNA can shed light on people’s ancestry. We walked in and sat down a few minutes before it was supposed to start.
The room was small, fitting about forty fold-up chairs, but most of them were full when Sykes came in with his young son. He was in his 50s, with crinkled eyes, and he was dressed for summer—jeans and a short sleeve shirt. Part of the year, he and his family lived here on Skye, and many of the locals knew him.
He mentioned that his books The Seven Daughters of Eve and Adam’s Curse had mostly been written at his home here, where Sorley MacLean once lived. MacLean was perhaps the greatest Gaelic poet of the 20th century, and he’d passed away several years earlier. When Sykes mentioned his name, there was a murmur behind us—MacLean’s wife was sitting in the back, smiling. “Ah, there you are, Renee, sorry I didn’t see you,” Sykes said. He spoke like a professor during office hours. English, and kind.
He began talking about mitochondrial DNA, which each of us (men and women alike) receives from our mother, and which our mother, in turn, received from her mother, who received it from her mother, and so on. Our mitochondrial DNA bears the signs of one line of women—our mother to our grandmother to our great-grandmother—stretching hundreds and thousands of years back. Over generations, this DNA undergoes slight mutations, so scientists can estimate how closely related two people are by comparing whether they share particular mutations, passed down by their common ancestor. The more mutations two people share, the more recent their shared ancestry.
The mirror image of mitochondrial DNA, Sykes said, is Y-chromosome DNA. It’s passed along from father to son, rather than from mother to child. While both women and men inherit mitochondrial DNA, only men inherit Y-chromosome DNA, since only men have a Y-chromosome in the first place. And for some reason, Y-chromosome DNA mutates much more often than mitochondrial DNA does.
This means that two people’s mitochondrial DNA might show the same mutations, but because those mutations happen relatively rarely, there’s no way to be sure that they occurred recently on the family tree, or long ago. By contrast, when two men’s Y-chromosomes show the same mutations, it suggests a more recent common ancestor, because if their shared ancestor lived many generations ago, we’d expect to find a lot of mutations that these two men didn’t have in common. Mitochondrial DNA measures two people’s shared ancestry in terms of millenia, while Y-chromosome DNA can measure it in terms of centuries, even decades.
And what better laboratory for studying the Y-chromosome’s workings, Sykes said, than a Highland clan whose power structure, whose traditions, whose name were all founded on patrilineal descent? A few years earlier, he and his research team had been gathering DNA samples from Scottish volunteers, and they’d noticed a curious pattern: A certain DNA signature, generally rare, seemed to be showing up more frequently in men with the MacDonald surname.
What’s more, they noticed, it was showing up in men named MacDougall and MacAllister. Sykes’s research student Jayne Nicholson pointed out that all three clans—not just the MacDonalds—were said to be descended from Somerled, the man who sat at the top of that genealogy Penny and I were reading in Lord Godfrey’s library a few days before.
To get more data, Nicholson wrote to MacDonalds and MacDougalls and MacAllisters all over Scotland, asking them to scrape the inside of their cheek with the enclosed brush and return it. Almost one hundred men responded, and this particular DNA signature was shared by 18% of the MacDonalds, 30% of the MacDougalls, and 40% of the MacAllisters. Was this the signature of Somerled?
Here’s where traditional genealogies came in. There were four living, legally recognized chiefs of Clan Donald, including our honeymoon host Lord Godfrey, and their status was entirely premised on patrilineal succession. Clan MacDougall didn’t have a chief, but the MacAllisters did. Sykes had his reservations about contacting the four MacDonalds and the MacAllister—what if one or more of them ended up not matching the others? The best way to deal with that potential predicament, he decided, was to promise all five of them that their results would be kept strictly confidential. So he wrote to each of them, explaining his request and enclosing a cheek-swabbing brush.
All five chiefs agreed, and the results were unequivocal: They all matched. The traditional genealogies had been right all along. For each chief, there had been roughly twenty-five generations, father to son, without a single instance of a “non-paternity event.” Their Y-chromosome DNA signature was Somerled’s, hidden away in every cell of their bodies. It made perfect sense that MacDonalds were less likely to have Somerled’s mark than MacDougalls or MacAllisters were—each MacDonald chief owned more land and thus had more clansmen, so more people would have taken that chief’s name despite having a different patrilineal ancestry.
Penny and I were thinking the same thing as we left the room after Sykes’ talk. Grandma’s younger brother, my great-uncle Chuck,
inherited his Y-chromosome DNA signature from his dad, my great-grandpa Lee McDonald. And if there hadn’t been any non-paternity events along the way, Chuck’s DNA signature would tell us the DNA signature of our McDonald ancestors.
If Chuck would agree to have his DNA tested, we might even be able to find out whether we came from the line of the MacDonald chiefs. We’d know whether Lord Godfrey was my cousin, after all. Maybe Chuck would match one of the chiefs more closely than he matched the others, suggesting that our McDonald ancestors came from a particular branch of the clan. There was a good chance he didn’t have the Somerled signature at all, but he could still match others, and that might tell us where our McDonald ancestors came from. I hoped there hadn’t been a non-paternity event along the way, but if Chuck’s Y-chromosome wasn’t a MacDonald Y-chromosome, so be it. I wanted to know whatever the truth turned out to be.
The truth, for now, was that Clan Donald territory wasn’t yet a familiar place, no matter how somberly it stunned, no matter how much I wanted to feel at home. You probably already know about this, about being a tourist, when the airport advertisements are only the first of the little estrangements that tell you this place isn’t yours. The landscapes and the architecture and the uses of space, all of them, have a different feel. Newspapers mention political controversies you’re unaware of, old fights you don’t have a stake in. You’re removed from the sturdy, steady quiet of belonging.
But that’s also why you catch what you ordinarily don’t catch. You might notice the chips on old stone turrets, and that cat resting in a window up there, and the phrase you heard from a waiter while you were on your way out. You might begin to sense some things inside you that had been covered up by all the habits and expectations of home.
Maybe those few moments will reach into you more than a thousand days at home could have. Maybe you’ll find yourself thinking that this new place is somewhere that would fit you, because there’s a comfort that you never saw coming. Home doesn’t have a monopoly on belonging—fragments of home are scattered all over, in every place that matters. And that place could be anywhere, and it could even be here, in this far away corner that you’d only imagined, until now.
CHAPTER 6
ANOTHER LOOK
Back in America, back to my habits, I brought out my notes and papers and looked again at my McDonald family tree:
From Bryan Sykes, I knew that DNA might be able to give me an idea of where my McDonald ancestors came from, but only distant cousins or documents could tell me exactly who those ancestors were. Before the wedding and honeymoon, I’d found Hiram McDonald and his wife Nancy in the Lincoln County, Missouri records beginning in 1836, but I couldn’t figure out who Hiram’s parents were—my supposed link to Clan Donald.
I went to Ancestry.com again, and searched for any McDonalds or McDaniels in Lincoln County before 1836. According to the 1830 census, there weren’t any households headed by anyone with those names, but there were two households headed by people with the name McDanel. I’d noticed that before, but had figured they weren’t related to Hiram. I’d thought their name was McDanold or something similar, and besides, neither household was headed by Hiram, so there was no evidence that these families were connected to him.
But now I took another look. The Cyrus McDanel household was headed by a young man with a wife and children, while the Elizabeth McDanel household was headed by a woman in her forties, and included eleven young adults and children. Elizabeth was listed one page after Cyrus, so they probably didn’t live too far from each other.
Then I noticed something from the Missouri marriage records at Ancestry.com. No McDonalds or McDaniels got married in Lincoln or Pike Counties until 1829, but between 1829 and 1846 there were nine: Betsy, Rebecca, Hiram, Darius, Thomas, James, Patsy, Nancy and Ezekiel. And eight of the nine got married after 1830. Were these eight people among the eleven young adults and children in the 1830 Elizabeth McDanel household? Were they all Elizabeth’s children, including my ancestor Hiram?
Maybe. And maybe, by looking at the early Lincoln and Pike County records, I’d be able to uncover some connections among all these McDonalds and McDaniels.
I started by focusing on those 1830 census entries for the Elizabeth McDanel and Cyrus McDanel households. Cyrus had been born between 1800 and 1810, and Elizabeth had been born between 1780 and 1790, so she was old enough to be his mother. But Cyrus wasn’t listed among the nine McDonalds or McDaniels who’d gotten married in Lincoln or Pike Counties in the 1830s and 1840s. In fact, no one named Cyrus McDonald or McDaniel had gotten married anywhere in Missouri prior to 1830.
Then I looked at the 1820 census and discovered that there’d been no McDonalds or McDaniels living in Lincoln County at the time, which meant that Cyrus could have gotten married outside of Missouri in the 1820s and then moved to Lincoln County by 1830—while still being Elizabeth’s son. This didn’t prove that he was her son, but it showed that he might have been.
Now I looked at the names of the people who were listed next to Elizabeth in the 1830 census. Maybe she lived near them because of some family connection; maybe they’d moved to Lincoln County and bought land together. I wrote down their names and then looked them up in the online Lincoln County records. No luck. No marriages with McDonalds or McDaniels, no land sales or other transactions involving Elizabeth.
But then I did the same thing for Cyrus, who was one page away from Elizabeth in that 1830 census. The list read: Samuel K. Tilford, Ezekiel Downing, Cyrus McDanel. And as soon as I saw the name Tilford, I searched the Missouri marriages again at Ancestry.com. There it was: Liza Ann Tilford and Hiram McDonald, married on February 1, 1833 in Lincoln County.
My ancestor Hiram had married Liza Ann Tilford three years before he’d married my ancestor Nancy Buchanan. I’d seen this before, and had assumed that Liza Ann had died young, without any children.
Now I looked in the 1850 census, which was the first to list every member of a household, and saw that the only Tilford household in Lincoln County was headed by Samuel K., now aged sixty-eight, living with his wife and three adult children. I glanced over the names of the children, and then I came across the youngest person in the household. She was a fifteen-year-old girl named Eliza A. McDonald.
Hiram and Liza Ann had a daughter together. Liza Ann almost certainly died when her daughter Eliza was very young, and then Eliza was raised in the household of the Tilfords, who were probably her grandparents. But why wasn’t Eliza brought back into Hiram’s family, at least once he married Nancy?
I didn’t have an answer yet, but maybe all of this told a story about Hiram’s origins. I now knew that Cyrus McDaniel/McDonald, who seemed to be a son of Elizabeth, had lived just one farm away from Hiram’s future wife and in-laws. I noticed, too, that there were two men aged twenty to twenty-nine in Cyrus’ 1830 household. One was Cyrus, but the other could have been Hiram.
And if Hiram had lived with Cyrus, that could explain how Hiram had come to know Liza Ann. Maybe Cyrus and Hiram had done some work for Samuel K. Tilford and had sat down to lunches with the Tilford family. Maybe Hiram used to walk over to the Tilford house, where he was welcomed, and exchanged glances with Liza Ann while her parents hopefully weren’t looking.
No matter how this happened, exactly, it seemed that Hiram had met Liza Ann through Cyrus—here was a McDaniel/McDonald who was Liza Ann’s neighbor, who was likely to know the Tilford family. Associating with the same people, living near them and working with them and marrying into their families, was to be expected of two brothers.
I couldn’t believe that I’d missed this before.
Then I moved on to Ezekiel Downing, who was living between Cyrus McDaniel/McDonald and Samuel K. Tilford in 1830. Was he linked to Cyrus or Elizabeth or Hiram in any way? My trusted guide, Google, took me back to the Lincoln County GenWeb site, the same place where, before the wedding, I’d found the transc
ription of Hiram and Nancy’s gravestone at the Bryant Creek Cemetery. Now I found a burial place called the Ezekiel Downing Cemetery, with just thirty-two names, a tiny census of the dead. The graveyard must have been on Ezekiel Downing’s land, and there were a number of Downings listed, including Ezekiel himself (“b: Aug. 25, 1795; d: Jan. 22, 1849”). But toward the bottom I saw: “Eliza Ann McDONALD – b: Aug. 1, 1834; d: June 22, 1879.”
Hiram’s daughter from his first marriage had been buried in the same little graveyard as the Downings, who lived next to Cyrus in 1830. This suggested that Hiram and Cyrus both had a connection to Ezekiel Downing—another little piece of evidence that they were brothers.
I clicked back to the Lincoln County GenWeb site and saw that there was one other transcription of the gravestones at the Ezekiel Downing Cemetery. I clicked on a link that took me to the new list, and it mentioned how the cemetery got its name: “Located on the original Ezekiel Downing land which has been in the family since 1816.” I began reading the names, and recognized them from earlier. But I came across one name that the first transcriber had missed: “Elizabeth A. McDONALD - b: 1786; d: 1853 w/o John.”
Elizabeth McDonald. Wife of John. The birth year of 1786 matched the 1830 census record for Elizabeth McDanel, the one I suspected was the mother of Hiram, Cyrus, and the rest—the census record said Elizabeth McDanel had been born between 1780 and 1790. If these two Elizabeths were one and the same, then here was another reason to think she was Hiram’s mother; she was buried in the same small cemetery as Hiram’s daughter Eliza.
Reunion: A Search for Ancestors Page 4