Ancestry

Since the last post, we have toured west Scotland around Mull and Skye. This leads me to reflect on ancestry. My mother's family from Nottinghamshire mining stock I will write about later. My father came to England from Dublin in 1936 and joined the RAF. Of the Protestant persuasion, his parents came originally from Scotland. Any connections between the name Bigger and the town of Biggar in Scotland I doubt, having visited Biggar last year and talked with a local historian. But he certainly came from the Glasgow area. There were several Biggers in Ireland, including a medical family, Sir Hugh  Bigger as Officer of Health for Dublin early in the 20th century, and Prof. Joseph Warwick Bigger who wrote the first Bigger's Handbook of Bacteriology, the standard text throughout the 20th century, Man Against Microbe in the 1930s, and reports such as that into diseases in Jordon just before world war 2. An Irish MP called Bigger was active in the call for home rule in the late Victorian age. Francis Joseph Bigger was a local historian and author in Northern Ireland.

My particular interest is in my father's mother, grandma Macmillan, who died probably around 1917 having born 13 children, 12 of which survived childhood. She either came from Canada, or Scotland via Canada to meet grandfather and settle in Dublin. I discovered Macmillans in Arran (the publisher and prime minister's family) but the more regular ones were in the west near Fort William. In many cases, 'were' is the right word. The Macmillans were harassed by their landlords, the Camerons in the period of Highland Clearances. Many Macmillans were cleared off lands their families had worked for centuries. Landowners in Scotland had a legal but not moral claim for land ownership, as royalty gifted lands to supporters, turning the traditional population into tenants who could be turfed out without redress. Many historic land claims today in the Highlands are based on the same inequity. By 1800 the Cameron laird thought himself as a landlord rather than a chief, and wished to create a stately home and estate, requiring him to raise funds, including rents, and clearing away unprofitable crofts and villages. In 1802, with evictions beginning, Archibald and Allan Macmillan left the Lochaber district with 450 people to make new lives, sailing in three ships, Jane, Helen and Friends. Where they settled became Glengarry County. (My thanks to James Hunter, A Dance Called America: the Scottish Highlands, the United States and Canada,  1994).
My grandmother was somehow related to the Canadian Macmillans, meeting and marrying grandfather sometime in the 1880s.

In Fort William, I looked at the statue of the Cameron chief two generations later without celebration.