Reunion: A Search for Ancestors

by Littrell, Ryan

  In May, he went to London and dutifully presented his Proposals Concerning the Highlanders to William and Parliament. He claimed to know the hearts and peculiarities of each of the chiefs better than any other man; as a Highlander himself, he was best positioned to speak reason to them, and to be trusted. The Englishmen agreed, depositing £12,000 into his London bank account and sending him back north. Grey John sent messengers to each of the chiefs, requesting their presence at his castle of Achallader, twenty miles southeast of Glen Coe, across the moor of Rannoch.

  To the castle, at the close of June, came our Alasdair MacIain, Angus MacDonnell of Glen Garry, Coll MacDonald of Keppoch, and many more of the chiefs, each with a retinue of men. Beside the great fire, over a hospitable meal with claret and whisky, John Campbell of Breadalbane told them of William’s offer. Campbell took each chief aside, promising him a set sum, trying to persuade.

  Only one of the chiefs was treated differently. When Campbell spoke to Alasdair MacIain, standing tall with his long, white hair, he insisted that any money owed to Alasdair be reduced, in order to compensate Campbell for the cattle and other livestock that the men of Glen Coe had taken from his lands two years before, in the wake of the Highlanders’ victory at Killiecrankie and our defeat at Dunkeld.

  Hearing this, Alasdair left, refusing to sign William’s agreement. Our men had killed redcoats and lost many of our own, and yet here was a concern with the value of Campbell cows. Before leaving, Alasdair told his sons and his tacksmen: “I fear mischief from no man so much as the Earl of Breadalbane.”

  Even so, many of the chiefs agreed to the truce, after hours of negotiating. Once the names were signed, once the claret was finished, Grey John rode south to London and delivered a sheet of signatures promising that the Highlanders would not fight against William and his government for a whole of four months.

  He did not, however, tell the entire story to the English. He told but half of it. For the chiefs had not simply agreed to lay down their arms in exchange for gold. No, they had agreed to the truce only because Campbell had made another arrangement with them at Achallader Castle, a spoken compact, one that William and his Parliament were forbidden to know.

  They were forbidden to know of it because this spoken treaty preserved the chiefs’ loyalty to our King James. Its terms were clear. If James decided to invade England or Scotland, or if he refused to approve the written truce, then the chiefs would be released from that truce. If William violated the written truce, however, Grey John of Breadalbane himself would have to muster 1,000 Campbells and join the chiefs to fight for the imminent restoration of James as king.

  In the middle of August, perceiving the business at Achallader Castle as a harbinger, William deigned to offer the people of the Highlands and Isles a promise: If their chiefs would just swear an oath of allegiance to him by the first day of the new year, 1692, then they would be pardoned for their treason. Their chiefs would be forgiven for any crimes laid against them.

  Quickly, Alasdair MacIain and the other chiefs asked two messengers to steal south toward Paris, hoping that the two of them might reach our King James and learn of his designs. The will of our king would dictate whether Highlanders would take William’s oath quickly, or take it only with a strategic delay, or take it not at all. The two messengers, George Barclay and Duncan Menzies, slipped away from Scotland in late August, dodging William’s troops and police all along their way, from Edinburgh down into England and then across the Channel. By the close of September, they were at the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, being greeted by James himself.

  Yet no answer came from James during those last few days of September. Nor did one come in the month of October, nor, even, in November. Barclay and Menzies were requested to remain at James’ court in exile, week upon week throughout the autumn, while ministers debated and James corresponded with the French.

  As December of 1691 began, just one month from the deadline imposed by William, James still had not issued his decision. In our glen, and throughout the lands of the Gaels, many suspected that James had no stomach for the fight. John MacDonald, Alasdair MacIain’s tacksman of Achtriachtan, obtained a letter of protection from the Governor of Fort William, John Hill, who hoped this gesture showed that Achtriachtan’s chief would submit soon. Whispers and messages across Scotland, England, and France told of a new invasion from the south, while other whispers, other messages, told of chiefs who were about to give up on that weakling James.

  In London, in the meanwhile, John Dalrymple was putting the plan into place. As Secretary of State for Scotland, he sat in elegant quarters of Kensington Palace, meeting Queen Mary regularly while William was at war on the Continent, exchanging letters with his loyal friends John Campbell of Breadalbane and Archibald Campbell, the Earl of Argyll.

  The plan had been discussed for some time, of course. Grey John of Breadalbane knew it very well, as did his cousin Archibald. The Earl of Argyll’s regiment would be the one.

  Dalrymple was convinced, however, that Governor John Hill of Fort William was too accommodating to the Highlanders, and might disrupt the operation. Hill, after all, was the man who had granted a letter of protection to our John MacDonald of Achtriachtan, besides other Highland men.

  Dalrymple decided to deal with Fort William’s Deputy Governor, James Hamilton, instead. Like Dalrymple, Hamilton was a Lowlander, and he had fought hard against the Irish people and our James. In his letters to the south, Hamilton had written that he was eager to confront the Highlanders, eager to “put in execution such commands as shall come for reducing them to better manners.”

  Dalrymple, knowing the right man without yet being honoured by his acquaintance, sent Hamilton an introductory letter that read: “It may be shortly we may have use of your garrison, for the winter time is the only season in which we are sure the Highlanders cannot escape us, nor carry their wives, children and cattle into the mountains.” Dalrymple did not tell very much more in this first letter. No, he decided to wait two days, so that Hamilton had two full nights of sleep before receiving the next message.

  That message read: “The MacDonalds will fall into this net….Let me hear from you whether you think that this is the proper season to maul them in the long, cold nights.”

  CHAPTER 23

  UNCLE ANGUS

  An envelope came in the mail, and it was from Virginia. From Kathy Vockery in Garrard County, Kentucky, I’d learned that my ancestor Angus McDonald might have lived in Amherst County, Virginia before migrating to Kentucky in the 1780s or 1790s. Then, online, I’d found the Amherst County Museum & Historical Society, emailing them to ask for help. And now here was this envelope.

  The cover letter was written by hand, signed by Charles Hamble, Volunteer Researcher. Though most of the Amherst County records were held at the courthouse, the Museum & Historical Society had a large collection of books by genealogists who’d read through some of those records and had transcribed them. Charles had taken the time to look through all the books for me, and had enclosed copies of everything he’d found.

  He hadn’t been able to uncover a marriage record for my Angus in Amherst County, nor in any of the surrounding counties, and not a single will or probate record from the area mentioned Angus. But there were land records—an Angus McDonald or McDaniel bought and sold several tracts in Amherst County in the 18th century.

  The first one was dated May 9, 1767, showing that Angus McDaniel had 99 acres of land surveyed along Brown Mountain Creek. Then, a year later, another 82 acres were surveyed for their owner Angus McDaniel along the north branches of the Pedlar River.

  This went on for the next twenty years, several land purchases in the name of Angus McDaniel: On both sides of the north fork of the Buffalo River, and by Nicholson’s Run, and at the head of the south branches of the Pedlar River, and soon I found that the land surveyed for Angus McDaniel in 1775 was recorded as the property of
Angus McDonald in 1784.

  Then there was this 1772 deed of trust between Angus McDaniel and the George Kippen Company, merchants of Glasgow, Scotland. Angus had mortgaged 156 acres to the merchants, and from the description of the land, I could tell that it was a tract he’d purchased just two years before. Why did Angus have to mortgage land that he’d just recently bought? Did this hint at a family connection to Glasgow?

  And the more I looked, the more I could see that all these records, from 1767 into the 1790s, referred to the same man. On a map, Charles had highlighted the creeks and rivers that served to mark off the pieces of land belonging to an Angus McDaniel or Angus McDonald, and all the tracts were within two or three miles of one another, tucked away in the northwestern corner of the county. The 1767 purchase and the 1775 purchase, for instance, looked to be just a mile apart, and both were recorded as being adjacent to the land of William Taylor. Angus had decided to settle right next to the Blue Ridge Mountains, in the hills.

  Charles had discovered one other thing from the land records: Some of Angus’ parcels were near the lands of a George McDaniel and a John McDaniel. My ancestor Angus had sons named George and John, so were these two men related to Angus?

  But all right, time to step back. I was getting ahead of myself. Because none of the land records proved that this Amherst County Angus was my Angus. Thousands of Scottish Highlanders emigrated to Virginia before the Revolutionary War, so the Angus McDonald/McDaniel who appeared in Amherst County, Virginia in 1767 might have been a different man entirely. I needed to find a piece of evidence clearly showing that Amherst County Angus was identical to the Angus McDonald who lived in Garrard County, Kentucky from the 1790s to 1828.

  In this envelope from Charles, though, I found a clue. In 1794, Richard Ballinger and his wife Elizabeth sold land that had once been owned by Angus McDonald, and in connection with the sale, there was a Kentucky link: Justices of the Peace for Mercer County, Kentucky “quizzed Elizabeth Ballinger and Martha McDaniel apart from their husbands.”

  Now, I knew that part of Mercer County had been split off in 1797 to form Garrard County, where my ancestor Angus lived, and Internet posts said that some of my Angus’ children had gotten married in Mercer County prior to that year. So, before 1797, my Angus probably lived in the part of Mercer County that split off to become Garrard County—and here was a Martha McDaniel of Mercer County being “quizzed” in 1795, apart from her husband, regarding land that once belonged to Angus McDonald of Amherst County, Virginia.

  If this Martha was the wife of my Angus in Kentucky in 1795, then he just had to be Amherst County Angus. And if Martha was his wife, then she very well could be my ancestor, too, the mother of my ancestor John, who was probably born in the 1780s.

  To find out, I’d have to explore the Amherst County records, the ones that might not have made their way into the books on the Museum & Historical Society’s shelves. I was thinking about boarding the train in New York and heading southwest, but when I looked at sites devoted to Virginia genealogy, I learned that a copy of every record, from every county courthouse, was available on microfilm at the Library of Virginia in Richmond, the capital.

  Well, then. What if the names of my Angus’ parents were right there, in one easily found document on microfilm? Why travel all that way, only to find out in a matter of minutes that the search would have to shift to someplace else entirely? Better to get a first read from someone else, and then figure out things from there. At the Library of Virginia site, I found a list of professional genealogists in the area, and after a quick email, James Ward agreed to take me on.

  Several weeks later, James’ findings arrived in a white folder. He summarized the Amherst County records in a few pages, and I scanned over the first page, and then the second, with all these paragraphs mentioning McDonalds and McDaniels, until I saw: “11 April 1803—Angus McDaniel and his wife, Martha, of County of Garrard and State of Kentucky to Henry Camden…110 acres on the head branches of Pedlar and Richeson Creek on the lines of David Moore, James Frazier, Nicholson Run, William Taylor.”

  I went back to the land records that Charles Hamble had discovered. This 110 acres, sold by Angus and Martha McDaniel of Garrard County, Kentucky in 1803, was the same 110 acres that Angus McDaniel had bought in 1775, along Nicholson Run, adjacent to the land of William Taylor. And that 1775 Angus was the same Angus McDaniel/McDonald who appeared again and again in the Amherst County records from 1767 into the 1790s.

  Now I knew it for certain: My ancestor Angus McDonald was in Amherst County, Virginia, right next to the Blue Ridge Mountains, by May of 1767, and his wife in the 1790s and early 1800s was a woman named Martha, who could be the mother of my ancestor John. Since Angus died in 1828, and first appeared in the records in 1767, it appeared that he was born in about 1740.

  But how did Angus move to Amherst County to begin with, and who was Martha, and how did they end up as husband and wife? Where did they come from?

  James hadn’t uncovered a marriage record for Angus and Martha, and he hadn’t found a will or probate record for either of them. This first round of searching, in fact, didn’t lead to any records in Amherst County that revealed the parents or other relatives of Angus or Martha. But James had uncovered one new hint.

  My Angus’ neighbors, George and John McDaniel, were brothers, and George bought land from my Angus in 1780. George and John’s father, George McDaniel, Sr., left a will in Amherst County in 1818, but it didn’t include Angus in the list of George, Sr.’s children. That suggested Angus wasn’t his son. Still, these records raised the possibility that George, Jr. and John were related to my Angus, perhaps as cousins. If they were, then following their family tree might lead me to mine.

  If all I had to go on were these old documents, I probably would have come away suspecting that George and John were related to my Angus, at least on Angus’ father’s side, but I would have had no way of knowing for sure. But with DNA, I had a chance of figuring this out. Was there some patrilineal descendant of George, Jr. or John whose DNA signature could be compared to Uncle Chuck’s?

  Before stalking for any more cheek swabs, I went to Ysearch.org, a site that allows people to submit their DNA markers, no matter which company they’d submitted their DNA to. I searched through the McDaniels, and after a while, I found a man who was patrilineally descended from the brother of George McDaniel, Sr., of Amherst County—paternal uncle of George, Jr. and John. Assuming there hadn’t been a non-paternity event, this man had the same DNA signature as the two McDaniel brothers who lived next to my ancestor Angus.

  And looking through the DNA markers, there was no doubt: He had the signature of Somerled, the signature that Penny and I had heard Bryan Sykes discuss on the Isle of Skye during our honeymoon. The fact that this man had the McDaniel/McDonald name, along with the Somerled signature, meant that my Angus’ neighbors George, Jr. and John were descended from the MacDonald chiefs. They had the same DNA signature as the chiefs of every branch of Clan Donald.

  Except for Glencoe.

  Since the Amherst County McDaniels didn’t have the Glencoe DNA signature, they couldn’t have been the paternal cousins of my Angus McDonald. George McDaniel, Jr. and his brother John McDaniel knew my Angus McDonald very well, and they lived next to him for years, but they came from a different family, at least on their father’s side. These McDaniels might have been maternally related to my Angus, or they might have been his in-laws, but if I were going to discover Angus’ father, with his Glencoe DNA, then I’d have to look elsewhere.

  Which brings us to the mystery of Uncle Angus.

  In that 1821 court record from Garrard County, Kentucky, my Angus said that his uncle Angus McDonald had served in the French & Indian War of 1756 to 1763, also known as the Seven Years War. As a reward for his service, Uncle Angus had been awarded land that had been “entered, surveyed and granted to John Savage and Company.” Uncle Angus must have served along
side this John Savage, whoever he was.

  I went to Google, typed “John Savage French and Indian War,” and was taken to a site about the Savage Land Grant. In 1754, the site said, the Governor of Virginia promised land to any man who would join the Virginia militia for the coming fight against France. John Savage was a captain in the militia, and after the war ended, King George III granted more than 27,000 acres to Savage and fifty-nine other militiamen. The site listed them, one by one, and I quickly saw that name: Angus McDonald.

  This had to be Uncle Angus. My ancestor Angus, writing in 1821 as an old man in Kentucky, had gotten it right about his uncle, about a land grant in Virginia roughly half a century before.

  Maybe there were some records connected to the Savage Land Grant that would reveal who Uncle Angus was. The first place to look was right here, on this page, where I’d found these clues about John Savage and Uncle Angus. The page was on the KYOWVA Genealogical and Historical Society site, devoted to the counties where Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia meet. These were the counties—part of the furthest reaches of Virginia at the time—where King George’s rewards had been placed.

  I emailed the KYOWVA Society and got a response from the Society’s librarian. Uncle Angus had been granted Lot #41, she wrote, right next to the tract allotted to John Savage himself. Uncle Angus’ lot comprised 400 acres that lay in the middle of modern day Huntington, West Virginia. That’s all she knew offhand, she wrote, but she’d be willing to look through the library’s records and tell me what was known regarding Uncle Angus.

  And just a few days later, she emailed again, telling what she’d learned.

  Uncle Angus never lived on his 400 acres, but he never sold it, either. It passed to his daughter Anne, wife of Richard Holliday of Hampshire County, Virginia, and then, in 1809, Anne and Richard sold all 400 acres. Uncle Angus had given the land to Anne in his will, probated in 1778 in Frederick County, Virginia.