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MacLeod families in Loth and Kildonan |
| By Peter Lawrie, ©1997 |
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This document is the result of a number of years during the 1980s researching my own MacLeod family origins in Kildonan. I began by visiting Wilrine, one of my great aunts in Inverness, a daughter of Joseph MacLeod, a prominent land leaguer from Helmsdale and subsequently Inverness town councillor and magistrate. He was also, for many years, the parliamentary agent for the Liberal Party in Inverness. Wilrine (Williamina Catherine) told that she couldn't remember much so I spent more than six months delving into paper records and microfilms before visiting her again. It was amazing how her memory had recovered when I showed her my findings - "that one is wrong, ... you have missed out so and so ...". Some years later after her death in 1990, my mother presented me with the bible which Wilrine had taken to church every Sunday. On the fly leaf was listed family names and birthdays going back to Alexander MacLeod, her grandfather and my great-great-grandfather. Alexander was a shoemaker in Helmsdale, born in December 1820 to an earlier Joseph MacLeod, but not recorded in the parish record since Joseph's first wife, Minnie Mackenzie, may have died in childbirth or soon after. Joseph married a second time in 1822 to Barbara Mackenzie and had a further six children. I have no direct evidence for this, but it is possible that Minnie and Barbara had been sisters and that Barbara had been enlisted to nurse the infant Alexander after Minnie's death. This genealogy goes back to the family of Alexander MacLeod and Janet Polson who were cleared from Eldrable - opposite Kilphedir - in the lower strath of Kildonan in 1817. Alexander's son Joseph, was alloted a tiny patch of land on the bare hillside of West Helmsdale. I have tried to include as many of their descendants as I could trace. Many of the documents I created from the original source are also available on my website for download. Please download the file MACLEOD.doc (which has been converted from the original .txt file) - it should open in any version of Word or OpenOffice |