FROM SCOTLAND TO NOVA SCOTIA
JUNE 1801
William MacKenzie and his wife Flora MacMillan and their five (?) children left Scotland for Nova Scotia on or about 8 June 1801 on the ship, Sarah. If you look at the Sarah’s manifest, it seems that the entire population of the East River Valley in Pictou County, Nova Scotia came from Glen Urquhart, Inverness-shire, Scotland. It seems most likely that the family of William MacKenzie and Flora MacMillan lived there temporarily and just immediately prior to their emigration. And it is most likely the home of Flora MacMillan before she married William MacKenzie. Her gravestone in the Elgin Pioneer Cemetery in Pictou County, Nova Scotia says she was a native of Inverness-shire. They spent most of their lives in Kilcoy and Parkton, Killearnan Parish, Ross-shire. The manifest of the Sarah names them as “Wm. McKenzie, farmer and Flory McKenzie, spinster, from Urquhart”.
FLORA MACMILLAN
I knew nothing about Flora MacMillan until December 2005.
I received this email from Graeme M. Mackenzie, Historian & Genealogist, Clan MacMillan International Centre, Finlaystone, Scotland:
"The Glen Urquhart Macmillans were the largest branch of the clan north of Lochaber and most Macmillans in Ross-shire (except perhaps in the Outer Isles) were originally from "The Glen" (as its known up here). Most of the Macmillans on the "Sarah" - and indeed many of the emigrants bearing other names - were from Glen Urquhart, so I would certainly expect your ancestor Flora Macmillan Mackenzie to have come from The Glen as indicated on the passenger list.
However, I have a complete record of the Macmillan births/baptisms registered in the Urquhart & Glen Moriston OPR ("Old Parish Register" in fact) and there is no Flora to match yours - indeed there were surprisingly few Flora Macmillans born in Glen Urquhart at all, though Flora was a popular given-name amongst Macmillans elsewhere in Scotland.
It's sadly quite common not to find a birth/baptism from the mid-to-late 18th century, even in a parish like U&GM where the surviving register starts in the late 1730s. This is because the early registers rarely survive fully and completely legibly, and in any case were not an exhaustive record of the births and baptisms in any parish. The OPR is only a record of Church of Scotland members (so it excludes dissenting Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Roman Catholics), and not all of them could afford to register their children (there being fees payable to the minister or session clerk).
Such considerations apply to all names in all parishes before 1855 when compulsory - but free - civil registration came in all over Scotland. In the case of Macmillans however, and particularly in places like Glen Urquhart, there is another factor to be born in mind - which is that they were not always registered, or indeed known by, their proper surname. In some areas of Scotland in the 18th and early 19th century Macmillans went under the name Bell, while in Glen Urquhart and Ross-shire they were sometimes called Cameron (because of the loyalty of the main branch of the clan in the north - in Lochaber - to the chief of Clan Cameron). So, before entirely giving up on finding your ancestor Flora/Florence you need to check the OPR indices under the name Cameron as well as Macmillan/McMillan. The same applies when looking for the record of her marriage to William Mackenzie/McKenzie.
May I suggest incidentally that rather than using the IGI - which is not always to be relied on - you use the official OPR index which you can access on-line through the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS) website (www.gro-scotland.gov.uk) and that when you do so you search at least 10 years either side of the date of birth you are looking for (since few people before the 20th century knew how old they were or when exactly they were born).
It would be useful, in order that I can give you further advice on your search, if you could list the names of all the known children of William Mackenzie and Flora Macmillan in order of birth (I'm assuming they had more children once they arived in Canada), and if you could tell me where they settled in Nova Scotia (or indeed elsewhere in Canada). If it was County Pictou please be precise since I am familiar with its geography from researching many of the Macmillan families there and from visiting it.
I hope we can find out more about Flora and her family, and I look forward to hearing from you again in due course."
I have since written to Graeme M. Mackenzie and have also taken a look at the OPRs and the IGI.
There is nothing conclusive to report at this time.
MacMillans from Murlaggan and Caillich make up a sept of Clan Cameron. A branch of this clan, along Loch Arkaig, was confederated with Clan Cameron. Loch Arkaig is the only inland lake totally within the boundaries of Kilmallie Parish; situated among the mountains, it is between twelve and sixteen miles in length (depending on the method of measurement), one mile in breadth, and 359 feet deep. This east-west loch, which the glaciers scoured, drains into Loch Lochy at its south end. Near one extremity is a wooded island, which has been for ages the burying-place for the family of Lochiel and its chieftains. This loch was said to have been an ideal place to fish for salmon, but the construction of the Caledonian Canal brought this to an end. Somewhere surrounding this loch is "said to be the resting place of a fortune in French gold," brought to Scotland on April 29, 1746. Their burial grounds are located near the shore of the Loch at Murlaggan.
MURLAGGAN / MUIRLAGAN / MURLIGAN / MURBHLAGAN / MUR' LAGAN:
Either meaning "The Hollow Moor," or "A Little Bay" (translations vary). At the west end of Loch Arkaig, on the north shore (Also a place in the Braes of Lochaber, west of Roybridge, near Glen Spean.) Residence of the Camerons of Inverailort, where on May 8, 1746, the Highland Chiefs met and entered into a bond of mutual defense, agreeing never to lay down their arms unless instructed to by their Prince. Upon the Estates of Lochiel, circa 1788. Nearby is the burial place of the MacMillans.
CAILLICH
"The Old Woman," possibly connected with "Lubnacallich" (The Bend of the Old Woman). In the past this site has been a shiealing in Lochiel's forest grazings. Site of the home of the MacMillans of Caillich.
In the late 1700s - early 1800s Inverness-shire consisted on the following parishes. Flora may have come from one of these parishes: Inverness, Petty, Ardersier, Part of Croy, Daviot, Moy & Dalarossie, Cromdale, Abernethy & Kincardine, Duthill & Rothiemurchus, Alvie, Kingussie & Inch, Loggan, Boleskine & Aberturff, Dores, Kirkhill, Glenmorrison, Part of Kilmallie, Part of Ardnamurchan, Glenelg, Slate, Strath, Portree, Spizort, Kilmuir, Braccadale, Duirinich, Small Isles).
KILLEARNAN PARISH CHURCH
ROSS-SHIRE, SCOTLAND
SIDE VIEW OF KILLEARNAN PARISH CHURCH
ROSS-SHIRE, SCOTLAND
REAR VIEW OF KILLEARNAN PARISH CHURCH
ROSS-SHIRE, SCOTLAND
ROUTE TAKEN BY WILLIAM MACKENZIE AND FLORA MACMILLAN
FROM KILLEARNAN PARISH, ROSS-SHIRE TO FORT WILLIAM, INVERNESS-SHIRE IN 1801
TO BOARD THE SHIP SARAH BOUND FOR PICTOU, NOVA SCOTIA
The Sarah began her journey in Liverpool, England. The McKenzies boarded the Sarah at Fort William, Inverness-shire, Scotland with limited personal effects and their own provisions for the journey. It took the Sarah thirteen weeks to arrive at Pictou, Nova Scotia. Family lore maintains that during the crossing two or three of their children died, probably from small pox or whopping cough. But this has never been proven and remains disputable. There are no extant baptismal records in Scotland for these children. The only family record describing their deaths on board the Sarah comes from Margaret Bamford’s Account. Two survived: Isobel, christened October 22, 1795 in Killearnan, Ross-shire, Scotland and John, christened on 23 October 1797 in Killearnan, Ross-shire, Scotland. The birth and baptismal registrations of their other children born in Nova Scotia are located at St. Columba United Church of Canada in Hopewell, Nova Scotia.
FORT WILLIAM WATERFRONT
MAP OF FORT WILLIAM, INVERNESS-SHIRE, SCOTLAND
Here is the certification of the Sarah by the Customs officials at Fort William:
“In all 350, including men, women, children and infants, making the number of passengers to be 250. Calculating the age of those under 16 at 830 1/2 years, and therefore dividing by 16, making a full passenger, those above 16 years, 199; those below by the above calculation, 51. A total of 250 to go on board the ship "Sarah," burdened 350 tons.
Custom House, Fort William 8th June 1801.
These certify to the Honourable Board of Customs that what is wrote on the twelve preceding pages is a true and exact duplicate and copy of the list of emigrants furnished and given in to us the 4th Currt. by Mr. Hugh Denoon, of Pictou, Nova Scotia, dated at Inverness, the 1st. inst. Intended to be shipped by him at this port on board the "Sarah" of Liverpool, Smith, master, to be furnished by themselves in provisions for the voyage; and that on examining Mr. Denoon's calculations of full passengers we find the same not exact. The numbers we find by the list to be 350 souls, of which of full passengers above 16 year, 206; and 144 children under 16, whose ages amounts to 832 years and these years divided by 16 make of full passengers 52. A total of 258.
Colin Campbell
Robt. Flyter a Comm.”
Rev. Mr. David Denoon, who baptized Isobel and John MacKenzie in the parish of Killearnan, Ross-shire, Scotland had an eldest son, Hugh Denoon. It was this Hugh Denoon who convinced William MacKenzie and Flora MacMillan and their family to immigrate to Nova Scotia. There was great controversy about his methods of emigrant transportation.
Here is a description of Hugh Denoon taken from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online by J. M. Bumstead:
DENOON (Dunoon), HUGH, merchant, office holder, jp, judge, and emigrant contractor; b. 18 Sept. 1762, probably in the parish of Killearnan, near Redcastle, Scotland, eldest child of David Denoon and Mary Inglis; m. Catherine Fraser, and they had at least one son; d. 24 March 1836 in Pictou, N.S.
“Hugh Denoon was born into an established Highland family and should have followed in the paternal footsteps by attending university in Aberdeen and entering the Church of Scotland ministry. Instead, his younger brother went to Aberdeen and eventually succeeded his father, and Hugh went off to Halifax. After engaging in business there he went to the Pictou area, took up land on the East River as early as 1784, and later lived in Merigomish, where he acquired land rights from former members of the 82nd Foot. He subsequently moved to a house about one mile south of the town centre of Pictou, gradually acquiring a number of offices, including collector of customs, deputy registrar of deeds, justice of the peace, and judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and engaging in mercantile activity.
Most of Denoon’s adult life was spent in respectable obscurity in Pictou, but at the beginning of the 19th century he acquired certain notoriety in his native land as the first and most detested of the contractors transporting emigrants from Scotland to North America in the wave of emigration between 1801 and 1803. His undertakings were not only widely known and criticized in Scotland, but made a direct contribution to remedial parliamentary legislation, which ostensibly attempted to prevent abuses of the sort Denoon was held to have perpetrated in 1801. Separating fact from fiction in Denoon’s emigration ventures is no easy matter, for facts have always had a tendency to become embellished into mythology among Highlanders, and Hugh Denoon rapidly became a legendary villain for lairds and emigrants alike.
Denoon’s emigrant contracting was first noticed in Scotland in early March 1801, when it was reported that he had come lately from America (three months before the Sarah sailed for Nova Scotia!) to recruit emigrants, and that he proposed to secure vessels to transport them in May. Opponents of emigration were unable to gain any support from the Customs Board to arrest the scheme, but a leading Inverness attorney advised an official at Fort William that Denoon’s two ships could be inspected for proper accommodation and provisions and denied clearance if these were not adequate. When consulted, Scotland’s lord advocate, Charles Hope, expressed the opinion that “there is no Law for keeping the People in the Country against their Will,” although he was prepared to advise the board not to clear vessels until passenger lists were supplied and there was evidence that provisions were adequate for the voyage. Denoon duly handed in his lists, showing for the 350-ton Sarah of Liverpool 199 passengers over 16 and 151 children, and for the 186-ton Dove of Aberdeen 149 passengers over 16 and 60 children: a total of 559. Negotiations then ensued between Denoon and the board concerning a formula for converting the number of children under 16 into “full” passengers. The board, convinced by Denoon’s arguments that his ships were carrying 428 full passengers, decided that the provisions, which the emigrants themselves had supplied, and the space were adequate, and cleared the vessels.
The ships set sail in June and almost everything that could possibly go wrong on the passage did so. The 13-week voyage was an exceptionally long one, and smallpox broke out among the passengers. According to one contemporary account, 39 children under ten died. Off the coast of Newfoundland one of the vessels was boarded by a press-gang from the Royal Navy and a number of young men were taken off; Denoon somehow persuaded the senior naval officer to release them. In Pictou, the arrivals were put in quarantine and, unable to work, they had to be relieved by a public subscription fund. They eventually settled satisfactorily into the community, however.
Denoon’s venture raised enormous controversy. In its first report on emigration, issued in January 1802, (six months after the Sarah left for Nova Scotia!) the Highland Society of Edinburgh produced an allegation, never proved, that after customs officers had inspected Denoon’s vessels and pronounced themselves satisfied with the two tiers of berths and the ten feet of exercise space between them, he removed a platform hiding a third tier for passengers who were to be collected after customs clearance. The society also produced a devastating critique of the method used to determine numbers aboard Denoon’s vessels, comparing the results with the maximum number of passengers allowed by the slave trade legislation passed a few years earlier. By the least restrictive method, to which the society thought the Highlanders were entitled, the Sarah of Liverpool and the Dove of Aberdeen would have been allowed only 355 passengers. The society insisted that it did not wish to compare fellow Scots with slaves, but its calculations were electrifying and the implications clear. This evidence was one of the principal arguments used by a parliamentary committee in 1803 in support of its regulatory legislation (43 Geo. III, c.56).
Denoon represented an increasing trend for emigrant contractors to view their passengers merely as cargo, and to exhibit no concern for their welfare once they had been transported to and disembarked in North America. Aggravating the problems facing passengers was the growing demand in Britain at this time for timber from British North America. Within only a few years of Denoon’s venture most contractors were timber merchants filling vessels with human cargo rather than with ballast for the return journey. The legislation he helped provoke may have improved conditions on board ship, but at the same time it hampered emigration by enabling the government to harass contractors and by raising fares. After 1815 Britain no longer sought to limit emigration. In 1817 a new statute (57 Geo. III, c.10) was passed superseding the previous legislation.
Although Denoon’s return to the Highlands for more passengers was often rumoured, he apparently had had enough, and there is no evidence he ever again engaged in the transatlantic emigrant trade. His venture contributed not only to the British regulation of 1803, but also to the substantial influx of Highlanders to the Pictou region in the early years of the 19th century. After his brief appearance in the public spotlight Denoon returned to his former commercial activities. When he died he left over £7,000 of uncollected small debts."
This document shows us that 350 passengers came to Pictou on the ship Sarah which weighed 350 tons. It took over three months for the Sarah to cross the Atlantic Ocean and some of the passengers, among them 39 children, died of whooping cough or small pox on the voyage. You can imagine the state they were in on arriving in Pictou, and the responsibility thrown on the local government. Shortly after the landing of the Sarah the local government levied a five shilling tax on every passenger to the colony.
In the early 1800's immigrants were swarming to Nova Scotia from the British Isles. Most of them were penniless, and the shipmasters used to pack them into the holds of the old sailing ships which were poorly ventilated and infested with vermin. Here the passengers might be penned in for ten or eleven weeks (The Sarah took thirteen weeks!) while their ships crossed the Atlantic, so it is no wonder that disease spread like wild-fire and the ships were sometimes called "immigrant coffins". Most of the passengers on the Dove and the Sarah seem to have been farmers, laborers, tenants, and spinsters. The term "spinster" at that time simply meant any woman who could spin, and many of the so-called "spinsters" on these lists were the wives of the men listed immediately before. Mr. Hugh Denoon, the agent who persuaded the Highlanders to emigrate, told the Highlanders that in Nova Scotia the same tree would produce soap, sugar and fuel. He failed to tell them about the back-breaking work necessary to produce these results!
Most of these immigrants made fine settlers in Nova Scotia. The Weekly Chronicle of February 23, 1805 observed that "about 1300 hardy emigrants who arrived at Pictou in the year 1802 had already so far improved the different spots of uncultivated land on which they were placed that most of them had wheat, potatoes and other crops to sell. There was scarcely a family but possessed a cow or two, sheep and poultry, sufficient to assist others who might become their neighbours on the vast tracts of fertile land which remained uncultivated."
When the MacKenzie pioneer settlers came to Pictou County, Nova Scotia there were four MacKenzie families in the area of Centredale, Nova Scotia. To distinguish one MacKenzie family from the other "nicknames" were prevalent with the result that these families were known as the "Archies" - "Hoostens" - Garners" - and "Tuskers". William MacKenzie's belonged to the “Tusker” group. None of these MacKenzie families were related, although in later years a daughter of John MacKenzie (son of William MacKenzie and Flora MacMillan) and Flora MacDonald married into the "Garners" MacKenzie family.
Graeme MacKenzie, Clan MacKenzie genealogist, explains these "nicknames" in an email dated 5 January 2007:
Dear Bill
The nicknames:
"Archies" would almost certainly be descendants of a Archibald Mackenzie, and "Hoostens" would probably be descendants of a Hugh Mackenzie - one of the Gaelic equivalents of Hugh being "Uisdean" which was often given in English as something like "Huisden/Houston". I'm afraid I have no idea about "Garners", but I'll ask around amongst the Gaelic Society at our next meeting and see if anyone there knows. Your assumption about "Tuskers" relating to butchers looks reasonable - again I'll ask around here and see if anyone has come across it.
Congratulations incidentally on your website - most impressive and informative. It would be great if we could solve the mystery about Flora Macmillan Mackenzie, but at the moment I don't see an answer. One day however....
With best wishes for the New Year from Inverness,
Regards,
Graeme
MODERN MAP OF PICTOU COUNTY, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA