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Appendix: The ancestry of the MacLeods of Badnaban
We returned to London with a mass of information on MacLeods that we now had to sort out.
Although Scottish records are very good back the 1850s, they deteriorate rather rapidly before then and the earliest entries in the Assynt parochial register are only from 1798. However, there are earlier population lists (collected and published by Mark Bangor-Jones) that enable some tentative reconstructions of family trees. To confuse matters further in Scott’s case, Ally Alistair’s immediate family tree included several intermarriages of MacLeods.
The conclusions I reached on our return from Assynt in September 2006 have since been revised and changed several times in light of new evidence, the most recent being from a distant relative of Scott’s, Roddy MacLeod, who knew of oral traditions collected by an earlier relative, Kenneth MacLeod, in the Inverkirkaig area in the 1960s. It seems now that Ally Alistair’s father’s father Angus MacLeod may well have been, as Babs and Nan thought, from Elphin. Angus’s wife Margaret was also a MacLeod (her brother Roderick was Roddy’s ancestor). Her branch had been cleared from Concaneach shortly before 1812: the Alexander and his son Angus who we had found being cleared from there seem to have been cousins of hers. It seemed a shame, initially, to have taken so much interest in this last pair when it turns out they were not direct ancestors of Scott’s, but they were kith and kin, none-the-less, and finding out about their experiences had taught us a lot about the reality of the Clearances.
Using the population lists, I have pieced together a tentative line of descent for Margaret (and thus for her descendants Ally Alistair and Scott) going back to a much earlier Roderick Macleod, a younger son of Donald Ban MacLeod (d. 1647), Chief of Assynt. This is described in detail in my book Tracing Your Scottish Family History (Collins, 2008).
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