Читать книгу Collins Tracing Your Scottish Family History - Ryan Tubridy, Anthony Adolph - Страница 8

Before Christianity and literacy came to Britain, a special class of Druid, the seanachaidh or sennachie, memorized and recited the royal sloinneadh or pedigree. Long after other forms of Druidism had fallen away, sennachies remained, some as villagers who remembered the local family histories, others in the clan chiefs’ households. In about 1695, Martin Martin wrote in A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (Birlin, 2002):

‘Before they engaged the enemy in battle, the chief druid harangued the army to excite their courage. He was placed on an eminence, from whence he addressed himself to all of them standing about him, putting them in mind of what great things were performed by the valour of their ancestors…’

Martin, who used the term ‘marischal’ for the chief’s sennachie, also said he was,

‘obliged to be well versed in the pedigree of all the tribes in the isles, and in the Highlands of Scotland; for it was his province to assign every man at table his seat according to his quality; and this was done without one word speaking, only by drawing a score with a white rod which this marischal had in his hand, before the person who was bid by him to sit down; and this was necessary to prevent disorder and contention; and though the marischal might sometimes be mistaken, the master of the family incurred no censure by such an escape.’

It’s good to know that, occasionally, we genealogists were allowed to get it wrong.

Dr Johnson (1709-84), the London essayist and lexicographer who travelled around Scotland with the writer James Boswell in 1773, had trouble finding whether the bard and sennachie were different people, or one and the same, though he acknowledged different customs may have prevailed in different places: touring the Hebrides, he found that neither had existed there for some centuries. However, we do remain: Lord Lyon is High Sennachie of Scotland, and all genealogists worth their salt have inherited their share of this ancient Druidic mantle.

Aristocrats, such as John Campbell, fourth Duke of Argyll, shown in this painting by Thomas Gainsborough, have always had the help of sennachies or genealogists to record their family history.

have never left may know a lot about the ancestors you have in common, and might have tales about your forbears who migrated away.

What you are told will be a mixture of truth, confused truth and the odd white lie. Write it all down and resolve discrepancies using original sources. Watch out for ‘honorary’ relatives. Whilst writing this, I received an email telling me, ‘I recall as a boy, being introduced to people named to me as Uncle Ned, Auntie Jo, and Cousin Francis. Many years later, I found during my family history searches that none of them were in fact relatives, just very close friends at that time. Yet the oldest relative I was interviewing still described them as Uncle, Auntie, and Cousin, even under my challenge, with the result that I spent many weeks searching records for these people as relatives, and I never found any of them – but I eventually did find them as ordinary individuals shown as living in the same neighbourhood.’

Photographs of family holidays are particularly valuable when people used the time to retrace their roots. Alexandrina (‘Alice’) MacLeod left her ancestral home in Badnaban, Sutherland, to become a servant in Glasgow, marrying Walter Hooks there in 1935. They came back on holiday, bringing along Walter’s parents: here she is with her parents-in-law and sister Annie at nearby Achmelvish. There is more on tracing the roots of this family on pp. 50-1. (Photo courtesy of MacLeod Family Collection.)