Ancestors magazine (UK), June, 2009. Also Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Edmonton Journal, Windsor Star
The island under the falls

What little I know of my maternal grandmother is gleaned from photos—one at 16, looking proud and hopeful, and others, less sunny, taken in middle age. A sewer, she was always elegantly dressed (her only granddaughter inherited this obsession with clothes).

I also knew that the family clan of which Isabelle MacNab was a descendant had emigrated from Scotland’s Central Highlands to Canada’s Ottawa Valley in the 1820s. Armed with this fragmentary bit of genealogy, I flew to Edinburgh in search of my roots.

This is the year to explore a Scottish ancestry. Myriad events throughout the country, collectively called Homecoming Scotland 2009, are gearing up to The Gathering in Edinburgh in late July, when thousands the millions-strong Scottish diaspora and their descendents will return to celebrate their Scottish roots.

But I was heading for the town of Killin, west of Perth, where, in 1822, the 13th MacNab chieftain had persuaded 400 MacNabs to give up their subsistence farming and fishing for, well, subsistence farming and fishing on the other side of the Atlantic.

A painting owned by the Royal Ontario Museum shows this young laird in full Highland dress. His attire includes a red plaid kilt (above matching knee socks—fashion runs in the family), a sporran with big silver clasp and no fewer than six tassels, a fancy dress-coat, another swath of plaid across chest and shoulder, and a bonnet with feathers. He’s holding—rather threateningly I think—a dirk (or dagger). Another dirk and sword hang sheathed from his belt.

After arriving in Upper Canada, this 13th laird named Archibald—capitalizing on an insidious local tradition called the Family Compact—treated his followers like feudal serfs. The Canadian government eventually turfed him out—but that’s another story.

At the Scotlands People Centre in the National Archives of Scotland complex in Edinburgh, a quick Internet search confirmed that in the early 1800s the Glen of Dochart, embracing Killin, was chock-a-block with MacNabs.

A helpful archivist pulled some MacNab data from among the parish registers, wills and testaments, and census records in the vast archives collection dating to 1500.

It seems that the Earl of Breadalbane, a Campbell who presided over the Glen of Dochart well into the 20th century—hey, clan history gets complicated, if not downright nasty—left the archives 18,000 bundles of records (“so I love him,” said archivist Peter Wadley).

An early post-office ledger shows that Peter MacNab did a “thrice a week eight-mile round” for 10 pounds and eight shillings a year. And in a letter dated 1823, tenant farmer Janet MacNab asks the earl for rent relief after “a cow trod on the roof” of her cottage, requiring costly repairs. He obliged.

At the National Library, also in Edinburgh, I saw guidebooks and promotional pamphlets from the 18th century inviting Scots to abandon their homeland for the New World. “Some of them make outrageous claims about how wonderful it would be,” said curator of U.S. and Commonwealth collections, Kevin Halliwell.

Indeed, homesteading in the Ottawa Valley entailed felling trees and pulling stumps, clearing rocks and planting seeds—not to mention frigid winters. But researcher Maria Castrillo, in preparing a library exhibit on Scottish emigration, said of these Scots: “They were very adaptable. When something didn’t work out, they’d try something else.”

Driving northeast from Edinburgh, my driver and I stopped to gawk at the Forth Railway Bridge, lunched in historic St. Andrews, and then headed west through Dundee and Perth, towards the county of Sterling—“the gateway to the Highlands”—and Killin.
We stopped at Dewar’s World of Whisky in Aberfeldy, where a copy of a world-famous portrait of the 12th MacNab laird hangs over the fireplace in what passes for the old-world library of Tommy Dewar. Titled simply “The MacNab” (I’d find the original of this 1810 painting, by Henry Raeburn, in a Glasgow museum), this portrait is widely reproduced as the archetypal image of the fierce and implacable Scottish warrior.

Francis MacNab, said to have been “of gigantic height and strong originality,” was the unmarried father of numerous children. He is also reported to have had an intense antipathy to the tax collector. Legend says that while smuggling whisky from the Lowlands, he tricked and ridiculed a posse of much-hated excise-men into allowing his corps of fencibles (Scottish defenders) to pass with their cartloads of tax-free hooch.

Up at the Dewar’s bar, I raised a wee dram of an Aberfeldy 12-year-old single malt to this last of the great MacNab lairds. We then continued, in driving rain, along the shoreline of Loch Tay. Yellow gorse, and wiry old chestnut and birch trees, graced hills framed by low stone walls called “dry staine dykes.”

The historic Killin Hotel stands at a bend in the River Lochay. I asked the desk clerk if a lot of MacNabs still lived in Killin. “Aye, but more come to visit,” she replied.

A fire blazed in the dining room. I ordered the platter of wild smoked venison, salmon and duck—accompanied by jellies and warm French bread.

The hotel was full—a one-act play festival was in town. From my third-floor room I saw clearing skies over the snow-capped crags to the north.

In the morning, we drove to the most picturesque part of Killin, where the River Dochart rumbles across a vast expanse of slate-like rock, creating the Falls of Dochart, and then under an arched stone bridge to the Loch Tay.

Down a wending country byway we found Kinnell House, originally the seat of the MacNab laird. MacNabs trace their ancestry to the 10th century, though they often fought on the wrong—meaning politically improvident—side, leaving them somewhat worse for wear. Today Kinnell House, approached through round stone pillars and a long, steep track, is a fine country spread, with sheep in the pasture.

But what I’d really come to see was an island in the River Dochart, just below the stone bridge. A wooden sign attached to an equally old stone arch, framed by pillars identical to those at Kinnell House, reads: “Clan MacNab Burial Ground: Keys available from Tourist Information Centre.” The centre was closed. I clambered over a wall and wrought-iron gate, careful to avoid what would have been a nasty tumble.

Following a path through the woods, strewn with broken branches, I came to a stone enclosure about 30 feet square and seven feet high. The entrance was locked, but through a window-like opening I could read a few of the lichen-splotched engravings.
One said: “There are fifteen graves in this enclosure, nine of them being graves of chiefs.” Another revealed: “Francis MacNab, born 1733, died 1816.” So here lay that spectacular 12th laird.

At the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow, just a few feet from the portrait of “The MacNab,” hangs a painting by Scottish genre painter Thomas Faed, dated 1865. It’s titled “The Last of the Clan,” and subtitled, “The End of the Highland Way of Life.”

Rather than showing departing emigrants, the work depicts a few slack ropes and those left at the quayside. Among them is an old man seated on a small horse, bowed and dejected by the knowledge that that he’ll never see his offspring again.

I thought of my MacNab grandmother—and her unquenchable pride. A century and a half later this scene remains heart wrenching.