Finding your Scottish Family

Professor Allan I. Macinnes is a graduate of the universities of St. Andrews and Glasgow. His academic career as a lecturer – senior lecturer began at Glasgow. He subsequently moved to the university of Aberdeen then to that of Strathclyde as a professor of History. He is currently an emeritus professor of History at Strathclyde and a honorary professor in Irish and Scottish Studies at Aberdeen. He has published extensively on British state formation in the seventeenth century; on Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire in the eighteenth century; and on Highland Clanship and Clearances from the eleventh to nineteenth centuries.

Documenting Clanship in the West Highlands

Clanship was long in existence before it was cited in government records. Accordingly the authority of chiefs and leading gentry of the clans was personal rather than institutional. Clans liked to claim exotic, mythical, or heroic origins. But their emergence can be linked to successive waves of migration into the West Highlands – the MacNeills, MacLachlans and Lamonts as Irish Gaels; the MacDonalds, MacDougalls and MacLeods as Norse-Gaels; the Campbells as Britons; the Macleans as Picts; the Camerons and the Stewarts as Anglo-Normans; with a final category the Mackinnons and the Macnabs related to occupations, usually ecclesiastical indiscretions. Clanship was based primarily on personal ties of kinship and local association albeit their expanding influence can be documented through contracts of marriage and fosterage. Families living outwith their territories being affiliated through bonds of manrent. Chiefs and leading gentry were trustees for the territories in which their clans settled. However, clanship had a further feudal dimension. Chiefs and leading gentry acquired charters to estates as landlords. But not all lands held in charter were necessarily settled by their clansmen. In the case of the Campbells, the most acquisitive clan in the Highlands, their chiefs and leading gentry held lands and jurisdictions that stretched into the Central Lowlands and the north-east by the seventeenth century. Disputed settlement and ownership of lands led to feuds between the clans. Nevertheless, they had longstanding processes for conflict resolution, notably through arbitration leading to payments of compensation. Feuding, which could involve the removal of livestock and other acts of banditry, attracted the ire of central government whose creation of military companies to contain disorder facilitated tax collection. An exaggerated reputation for feuding, disorder and banditry carried over to clans who supported Jacobitism which, in turn, hastened the well-documented demise of clanship in the eighteenth century.