The Lincoln County GenWeb site even described where the Ezekiel Downing Cemetery and the Bryant Creek Cemetery were: Right down the road from each other. Hiram was buried near Elizabeth and his daughter Eliza, and this was one more clue linking Hiram to Elizabeth.
And if Elizabeth were Hiram’s mother, then John McDonald was almost certainly his father.
So could I find any records proving that the 1830 Elizabeth McDanel was identical to the Elizabeth McDonald buried in the Ezekiel Downing Cemetery? I searched in the 1840 census at Ancestry.com, and found no Elizabeth McDonalds or McDaniels in Lincoln County or Pike County. But in the household of Ezekiel McDaniel, one of the McDonalds/McDaniels who got married in the 1840s, there was a woman in her fifties. This could have been Elizabeth, but it could have been another woman—perhaps Ezekiel’s mother-in-law.
So I turned to the 1850 census, which was the first to list every household member. And there, living with Ezekiel, was Elizabeth McDaniel, age sixty-seven. She had to be his mother: She had his surname, and she was forty-two years older than he was. There was no other Elizabeth McDonald or McDaniel living in the area in 1850, so this Elizabeth was almost certainly the same one who was buried in 1853 in the Ezekiel Downing Cemetery.
And then I saw how the 1840 census showed Cyrus living next to James, another McDonald/McDonald who got married in the 1830s. And in 1850, Hiram was living close to the father and brother of Darius McDonald’s wife. And then Google took me to a site that mentioned the founding of the Smyrna Presbyterian Church in Pike County. Among the first seven members of the church were Cyrus McDonald, Darius McDonald and Elizabeth McDonald.
Penny had been working late that night, but I’d been able to duck out early. When she came home, I got up from the computer and hugged her, and said I was sorry she had to work late, and she said it was no big deal, she was just tired.
She was putting away her coat and shoes, and I asked, “You’ve had dinner already, right?”
“Right.”
Silence. Husband stepping away, back toward the computer.
“So,” she asked, “is there something you want to tell me?”
Furrowed brow. “Well, I think I might have figured out who Hiram McDonald’s parents were.” And it came out like a two-minute presentation:
•An Elizabeth McDaniel or McDonald was in Lincoln County, Missouri in the 1830 census, along with several young adults and children. Then, in the 1830s and 1840s, several McDaniels/McDonalds got married in the area, including Hiram.
•This same Elizabeth lived with Ezekiel McDaniel in 1850, so she just had to be his mother. Ezekiel was one of those young, married McDaniels/McDonalds, so the fact that Elizabeth was his mother suggests that she was the mother of at least some of the others.
•This Elizabeth from the 1830 and 1850 censuses was almost certainly the Elizabeth McDonald who died in Lincoln County in 1853, and whose husband was John McDonald.
•The other McDaniel/McDonald in the 1830 Lincoln County census was Cyrus, a young man who was living very close to Liza Ann Tilford, whom Hiram married just a few years later.
•In that 1830 census, Cyrus was living next to Ezekiel Downing, and Elizabeth McDonald, wife of John, is buried on Ezekiel’s land. So is Eliza Ann McDonald, Hiram’s daughter from his first marriage.
•Like Hiram, James McDonald and Darius McDonald got married in the 1830s and 1840s, and Cyrus lived next to James, while Hiram lived close to Darius’ in-laws. And Cyrus, Darius and Elizabeth started a church together.
These connections couldn’t just be coincidences. It seemed like Hiram had to be the son of Elizabeth and John. Cyrus, Darius, Ezekiel and the rest of them had to be Hiram’s siblings. All the facts fit into that story.
Still, what if there were some facts out there that didn’t fit into the story? I hadn’t found any, but that didn’t necessarily mean they didn’t exist. Hiram might have been related to John and Elizabeth in some way, but wasn’t their son. Hiram could have been their nephew, for instance, migrating to Lincoln County because his parents had passed away.
To know for sure that Hiram was the son of John and Elizabeth, I needed some piece of clear evidence, something to unwind the doubts—Elizabeth’s will, for instance, or the court records concerning her estate. But none of these were online. Maybe there wasn’t an answer to the question of Hiram’s ancestry, but if there were one, it would only be found in one place: Lincoln County, Missouri.
Time for a road trip.
CHAPTER 7
HIGHLANDERS
The Lincoln County GenWeb site said that all public records were at the courthouse in the county seat of Troy, so I’d probably be able to walk in and search, for a few hours, for a day, for as long as it took. And the cemetery transcriptions described where Elizabeth, Eliza, Hiram, and Nancy were buried, so I knew which roads to go down, and where to pull off and look around for telltale trees and houses and hopefully find the four of them. Their gravestones might even reveal something that the online transcriptions had missed.
In a couple of months, I’d be going home to Chatham, in central Illinois. Driving southwest on I-55 and across the Mississippi River to St. Louis would be easy, just a 90 minute drive, and it wouldn’t be hard to get from there to Lincoln County. I found a hotel in Troy, close to the courthouse and a short drive out into the country, where the cemeteries were.
As I planned the trip, though, DNA was on my mind. I could end up searching across Lincoln County for days and still find nothing, because no one had thought to write down who Hiram’s parents were. Or maybe someone had written it down decades ago, but the pages were now in some unknowing stranger’s attic, or maybe the pages had been thrown away or burned.
A few cells from the inside of one man’s cheek, on the other hand, might reveal nearly everything: Generation after generation had passed along that DNA signature to Chuck, Great-grandpa Lee’s son, Grandma’s brother. There was no way to forget it, or hide it, or change it. There was no arguing with DNA. A report from a DNA company might reveal that my ancestors came from Clan Donald, and that they had the signature of the clan chiefs, and that they came from one particular place in the Highlands of Scotland.
Or not.
Because what if all of that turned out to be a fantasy? Bryan Sykes had said that about 20% of men with the McDonald/MacDonald surname had the DNA signature of Somerled, the 12th century Highland king from whom the Clan Donald chiefs are descended. But this meant about 80% of McDonald/MacDonald men didn’t have Somerled’s signature.
And on the Isle of Skye, leaving Sykes’ lecture, I’d recognized it. Chuck probably wouldn’t have the Somerled signature, but that didn’t matter, I’d said: I just wanted to know the truth.
Well, now I wasn’t so sure.
You can imagine the scenario. Chuck’s DNA matches the DNA of a man—let’s call him John Miller—whose great-great-grandparents Thomas and Elizabeth Miller were good old friends of my ancestors Hiram and Nancy McDonald in Lincoln County, Missouri.
Clearly, there’d been a “non-paternity event” here, but there’s still hope for that MacDonald tartan, there’s still hope for my ancestor Nancy’s honor, because maybe Hiram had been the one who’d strayed. Yes, maybe that alleged descendant of Thomas Miller matched Chuck only because he had Hiram’s DNA signature, a McDonald one.
But then I go down the list of DNA matches, and all the men have the name Miller, and none have the name McDonald, and here’s introducing you to your new ancestor Thomas Miller.
I could already hear myself making the call: “Hello, is this David, the wedding photographer? Hi, I was wondering. Do you remember that tartan, the one that pretty much everybody in my family was wearing? Yeah, do you think you could airbrush it out of all the pictures?”
Besides, even if Chuck’s DNA didn’t bring a non-paternity revelation, there was
a chance that he wouldn’t match anyone at all. And even if the cheek swab did yield some cousins, those cousins might be really distant. Chuck might match a man on some DNA markers, but not match him on quite a few, which would mean that this man was related to us, but had an ancestral line that had branched off from ours a long time ago—perhaps five hundred years in the past. A match like that wouldn’t be close enough to reveal who my 17th and 18th century ancestors were, and where they lived before coming to America.
So when I searched for a DNA company, I was already prepared: Don’t be surprised if Chuck doesn’t have the Somerled signature, don’t be shocked if your ancestors have the name Miller or Johnson or Weiskopf, and most of all, don’t be surprised if the DNA dissolves into an Anglo-Scottish-Irish fog.
Googling the words “MacDonald” and “DNA” brought me to a website for people who had reason to believe that their ancestors came from Clan Donald. The project had over three hundred members, all of whom had submitted their DNA. There was even a press release from the project coordinator, Mark MacDonald, spelling out Somerled’s DNA signature. All I needed to do was persuade Chuck to participate.
Even though Chuck was my great-uncle, he was only three years older than Mom, so he’d always been more of an uncle to me, and I called him Uncle Chuck. He was a military guy, and he had stories about bar fights in various parts of the world, but now he was retired from all that. Officially, at least.
I often spent time with him when I went back to Chatham, but I didn’t have his phone number or email address, so I gave Mom a call. She was the first woman to be elected mayor of Chatham, and she ran a tight ship. She knew how to persuade. “I think Chuck probably wouldn’t mind,” she said. “I’ll talk to him.”
And soon, Uncle Chuck was sitting at Mom’s house, opening his mouth and saying “aaah” while she swabbed the inside of his cheek with the little plastic scraper. “Well,” Mom told me after the operation was over, “we’ll just send back this scraper and see what happens.”
Several weeks went by, and one day I woke up and had a glass of water, and poured the grinds into the coffee maker, and while the coffee brewed, I looked at my email. There was a message from the DNA company. Uncle Chuck’s results were in.
I clicked on the link in the email, and it took me to a website that had been set up for us. Here was the DNA signature of my McDonald ancestors, a number for each gene. Here was the DNA signature of my great-grandpa Lee, and of his father Will, and of his father William Duncan, and of his father Hiram. I went back to the website that listed the Somerled signature, and wrote it down in my notebook, number by number.
Then I started with the first of Uncle Chuck’s genes, checking it against its Somerled counterpart. The first few matched, but then there was a mismatch, and then a few more matches, but then another mismatch. As I moved from one gene marker to the next, Chuck’s genes showed more and more mismatches against Somerled’s, like a baseball team falling further behind with each inning. When I got to the end, there was no doubt. Chuck’s DNA signature wasn’t even close to the signature of the Clan Donald chiefs.
I was disappointed, and then I felt guilty for being disappointed.
Not knowing how to find out what the results meant, I once again turned to the most time-tested method: I typed Uncle Chuck’s DNA signature, every single number, into Google. And I found a post on an Internet message board by Mark MacDonald, the coordinator for the Clan Donald DNA Project, who had access to the DNA signatures of every project participant. In the post, Mark was asking others where a certain DNA signature might have originated: Did it come from Norse Vikings, like Somerled’s signature, or was it indigenous to the Scottish Highlands? The signature was almost identical to Chuck’s, so it must have come from a cousin of ours. Mark was asking about my family.
The consensus from the other researchers seemed to be that the signature was too rare to tell for sure. Mark thanked them, and as he thanked them, he referred to us as a “small but historically prominent family of MacDonalds.”
Small but historically prominent. What did that mean?
I already knew that we weren’t descended from the clan chiefs, but maybe “small but historically prominent” meant that we were related to some other famous MacDonald. John MacDonald, the first Prime Minister of Canada? Flora MacDonald, the one who saved Bonnie Prince Charlie by transporting him over the sea? The two brothers in California who started McDonald’s?
Mark seemed to be the right person to ask, so I decided to email him. I introduced myself as Chuck’s great-nephew, gave him Chuck’s DNA signature, and mentioned that my family hadn’t yet discovered who our McDonald ancestors were.
When Mark emailed me back, he seemed to make a vague reference to my family’s possible origins, but it wasn’t quite clear what he was getting at. One thing was clear, though: He wanted to know a little more from me. “What family traditions do you have?” he asked.
I wrote back: As far as I knew, my family hadn’t passed down anything about where our McDonald ancestors came from. But I was hoping he might be able to say more about what the DNA results meant. Over the next few hours, I went for a walk, checked my email. Watched the news, checked my email. Thought about dinner, checked my email.
Then Mark’s message showed up, and I began reading. I could feel the wet starting in my eyes, building with each sentence, until a tear fell out as I reached the end. Out of about 350 men in the Clan Donald DNA Project, there were only three who matched Uncle Chuck. All three had the name MacDonald, and all three could definitely trace their MacDonald ancestry to one little group of people, who lived for centuries in one particular place.
Glencoe.
I felt like I’d just heard my name for the first time.
CHAPTER 8
PORT NAM
MARBH
Bu mhath leam innse dhuibh mu mo mhuinntir, mu ’r dachaigh agus mar a thachair e.
I would like to tell you about my people, about our home, about how it happened.
I have lived in the glen my whole life, but what I know has not come from my eyes alone. It also has come from my father, and from all the bards before him, who remembered the old stories and brought them into a voice. It has come from my mother, who showed me how to watch for every moment in the glen.
But I will not tell you in that soon forgotten tongue, the tongue of my mother and father, and of all my ancestors. No, I will say this in your language. In the words of the south, in the language of the English, whose ways are all around me now: Their laws, their forts and signs, their roads made for the marching of redcoats. Their monarch, and their imagining of our history, because they were afraid. Their always spreading habits, their Cromwell and Magna Carta, their scripted dances and walled-away estates, their swarming navy. Their tidy shires.
I still cannot see how this happened, I still cannot believe that they came all the way here and did it. Because our glen, which you would call a valley, is so far north and so far west that it is days away from your Glasgow and your Edinburgh, let alone your London. It is so far north and so far west that when it meets the sea, it meets ocean water that has always remained north of the northern coast of Ireland. It is so far north and so far west that many generations passed before English or Latin or any other language was heard.
Before the English came, before we MacDonalds came, before even the Romans made their noises to the south, the Feinn lived here. The Feinn were a race of giant men, led by Fionn MacCumhail, father of our great bard Oisín. No one, no man anywhere, could hunt deer as well as the Feinn, and this was because of their hounds, who very nearly flew across streams, and went with them up into the mountains. These deerhounds gave our home its name: Glen of the Dogs, Gleann Comhann, Glen Coe.
From the south, from your south, you will first have to come over the moor of Rannoch. This is flat land for miles. The mountains are far away on the
horizon, at first, and the journey will take at least a day. You will find sky all over. The flowers and mosses grow short, and where a tree grows at all, it stands alone, and crooked. You will see no one here, except for a few of the broken men, who belong to no clan. You will hear few sounds, because there are no hills to bring back echoes.
Hundreds of ponds are all about you, and if you were to see them from atop the highest mountain, they might look like a man’s nose, or a cloven log, or three points of an antler. You will walk around pools, sometimes just the size of a bed, and they are your only mirror, as blue or white or grey as the sky is at that moment. Large stones and boulders are upon the ground every so often, as if they had been strewn about in a quarrel among giants.
For more than two hours, you have seen the mountain called Buachaille Etive Mòr, coming closer each time you paused, becoming bigger. Soon it is above you, on the left, and it is almost symmetrical, a cragged head of an arrow pointing to the sky. Across from it, to your right, is Beinn a’ Chrùlaiste, which slopes up from the moor and then steepens as it rises, becoming a wall of rock. Below these two peaks, down in the gap between them, is the way into our glen.
Now the mountains cover a little more of the sun. There is a fog about the peaks, probably, and the mist is settling down, beading up on your skin, making drops upon your clothes. There are the streams in your ears, plopping and flowing. Your shoes will slip upon the heather and ferns.
At first, the way is winding, under the mountains we call Beinn Bheag and Buachaille Etive Beag. But after a time, the view opens up in front of you, almost as straight as a hallway in a great house, with a high ridge along the right and the Three Sisters looming one after another on the left. The first of the Sisters is Beinn Fhada, then Gearr Aonach, and then Aonach Dubh, which leans over as though it were about to fall upon you.
Reunion: A Search for Ancestors Page 5