Life in Scotland

The decision to emigrate

Loch Tay from the Air

Our story begins in 1815 with the family of Peter McDougall, a 34-year old shoemaker living in the village of Fearnan on the banks of Loch Tay in Perthshire, Scotland. Peter and his wife of eight years, Catherine Campbell, had just made a momentous decision. They had decided to leave their ancestral home for the promise of a new life in the New World. They would take their three young children and what belongings they could carry, travel to Glasgow and then to the port city of Greenock, and there board a ship that would eventually deposit them in the Canadian wilderness.

It is hard to know what motivated this family to leave the relative security of a familiar world for the hardships and dangers of an uncharted wilderness, but it is likely that economics was the overriding factor. Life had always been difficult in the Scottish Highlands, but it had become more difficult in recent years due to the “Highland Clearances.” Beginning around 1785, many clan chiefs and other landowners began creating profitable sheep runs by clearing Highlanders from fertile areas and forcing them to eke out a living on small plots of poor land. What would have otherwise been an explosive social problem was largely defused by voluntary emigration. Scots were leaving Scotland in droves. They had been migrating to British North America in small numbers for many years, and would continue to do so in ever increasing numbers for decades to come.

Highland Clearances

The Highland Clearances were forcing whole communities to leave their homelands, but the emigrants were also being lured by the promise of better opportunities in Canada and the United States. It is likely that Peter and Catherine were attracted by stories of unlimited land that was pretty much free for the taking. It is also possible that friends or relatives had already settled in Canada and had written back encouraging them to do likewise.

There is still the question of why Peter and Catherine chose to emigrate at this particular time. The answer is that in 1815 the British government offered, for a limited time only, free passage and free land to families that met certain qualifications. The Peter McDougall family met those qualifications and they chose to take advantage of the government offer.

The Peter McDougall family did not travel to the New World alone. It was common for emigrants to travel with related families—brothers, cousins, etc.—but that does not appear to have been the case here. Instead, the Peter McDougall family was part of a group of emigrating families that shared a common religious conviction. They traveled—and eventually built a new community—with several families that belonged to two small Baptist churches. So, it appears that religion was also a factor in their decision to emigrate, though how great a factor it is difficult to say.

Old Highlander

Before we follow Peter and his family on their journey, let's review some of the issues that have been mentioned thus far. In the remainder of this section, I will discuss:

• the geographic area where Peter and Catherine lived

• how an enclave of McDougalls wound up in this part of Scotland

• the parents and siblings of Peter McDougall

• the history of the Baptist faith in Scotland

• how and why the British government was encouraging this kind of emigration.

Village of Fearnan from Across Loch Tay

Perthshire and Loch Tay

The emigration records show the Peter McDougall family as coming from Fearnan, a small village on the banks of Loch Tay in Perthshire, Scotland. A photo of Fearnan, taken from across Loch Tay is shown to the right.

The maps below, show where Scotland is located, where Perthshire is located within Scotland, and where Fearnan is located in the Loch Tay area.

Location of Scotland	Location of Perthshire
Vicinity of Loch Tay

Here is another photo of Loch Tay. [Click on the thumbnail to see a full-size version]

The Church of Scotland in the nearby village of Fortingall was established over 420 years ago. It is there that Peter and his siblings—and presumably many earlier generations of McDougalls—were baptized, and it is there where Peter and Catherine were married.

Here is an old house in Fortingall. [Click to enlarge]

It seems that the village of Fortingall is most well known for three things:

• A yew tree in the churchyard of Fortingall village. The Scottish Forestry Commission verifies an age of no less than 3,000 and possibly as much as 9,000 years. Based on the size of the tree in 1769—when records show that it was 57 feet in circumference—and comparing that to the growth of other yew up and down the country, the best estimate is 5,000 years, which makes it the oldest known living thing in Europe.

• The Roman bridge on the south side of the river. Although the bridge is not among Britain's most spectacular Roman remains, it is complete, and it is an interesting reminder of how far north the Romans ventured. It is well-attested that a Roman camp existed near Fortingall. There is also a persistent rumor, which first appears in the writings of the medieval historian Holinshed, that one of the Roman children born in the Fortingall camp grew up to become Pontius Pilate.

• The standing stone in the middle of a field, across the road from Fortingall hotel. This commemorates a medieval plague (probably the Black Death of the 14 ^th century) during which all inhabitants of the village died, except one old woman. She loaded the bodies onto her donkey-cart and buried them in the field.

McDougalls in Perthshire

It was surprising to learn that our McDougall ancestors came from Perthshire rather than from the western coast of Scotland near the Firth of Lorne, with which the McDougall clan is normally associated and where McDougalls were so strong in number. But there is an explanation. According to [1], many McDougall families migrated from their traditional lands to this part of Scotland in the 14 ^th Century, after it had been largely depopulated, as noted earlier, by the Black Death (i.e., bubonic plague).

“...in 1368 King David Bruce granted Glenlyon to John MacDougall and his wife [the king's niece]. In 1372 the grant was confirmed to MacDougall himself, presumably on the death of his wife. MacDougall is believed to be the famous Iain Dubh nan Lann of Glenlyon tradition. If so, he was one of the most famous warriors of his time and many stories are told of his prowess...

Tradition also claims that it was Iain Dubh that first brought MacDougalls to the Fortingall. It would seem that the whole district was almost desolated by a visitation of the great plague in the 14 ^th century. In the Kirkton of Fortingall the ravages of the plague were especially severe, and the population was so decimated that it was considered necessary to bring other people into the district to take the place of those who had perished. It was then, it is supposed, that Iain brought a number of his clansmen from Lorne to re-people the Dale of Fortingall. And the MacDougalls were, until quite recently, very numerous in that district.”

The Peter McDougall family

The Church of Scotland records at Fortingall document the marriage of Peter McDougall's parents, Donald McDougall and Katherine Anderson, in 1759. They also document the christening of Peter, his three brothers, and his four sisters between 1760 and 1783. These birth dates assume that the christening took place shortly after birth. Click here to see a list of family members.

The Fortingall church records also document the marriage of Peter McDougall to Catherine Campbell in 1807 and the christening of their first child, Catherine, in 1809. The records do not show christening dates for their two sons, John and Alexander, who were born in 1813 and 1814, respectively. It is possible that the parents converted to the Baptist faith sometime between 1809 and 1813, and consequently chose not to have their later children baptized in the Church of Scotland. We know that the Baptist Church had a strong evangelical movement during that period, and we know that Peter and Catherine were active members in the Baptist Church at the time of their emigration to Canada.

The Baptist Church in Scotland

According to [2], the Baptist faith was first introduced to Scotland in 1651, when the Cromwell government stationed a garrison of English soldiers in Perth. For the next couple of centuries, a handful of Baptist churches survived, but primarily in the larger towns. In the early 1800's, however, there was wave of itinerant evangelism that established several churches in rural areas, including Lawers (1808) and Killin (1808). And it is from those two Tayside churches that Peter and Catherine's emigration party was drawn.

It is difficult to know for sure what role religious conviction played in the decision of Peter and Catherine to emigrate, but according to [3],

“Most emigration from Perthshire to Glengarry County occurred in the five years after 1815… The clansmen left Scotland because of religious differences with their landlords…and because of the pressure put on agricultural resources by a rapidly growing population and the amalgamation of tenant farms into sheep farms.”

Unlike so many Scottish emigrants, Peter and Catherine chose to travel and settle not with members of their extended family—at least as far as I can tell—but with members of their church. Considering how much pioneer families have to rely on one another for aid and comfort, this was a significant decision.

British emigration scheme

Great Britain had lost control of most of its North American territories only a few years ago when the United States gained its independence, and now they had just finished fighting yet another war with their former colonies. The war experience caused much concern in the British government, because it seemed only a matter of time before Canada too would be demanding independence. Sparsely populated Canada was gradually being settled, but most of the settlers were independence-minded Americans. The solution that the British government came up with was to populate the land instead with loyal British subjects. And so, a subsidized emigration scheme was hatched. The scheme is described in [4] as follows.

"Once the war [of 1812] was over, the British government set in motion an imaginative scheme of emigration which is usually remembered as the especial project of Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. The experience of the war had shown that the loyalty of many of the Americans who had settled in Upper Canada could not be depended upon. The need for additional loyal subjects in the thinly populated province with its long frontier so dangerously exposed to the United States was pressing—why, therefore, not bring them in from Britain? The British government accordingly formed a plan by which a select group of emigrants was to be given free passage to Canada in the transport ships which would—conveniently—be going to Canada in any case in 1815 to bring back soldiers from the recent war.

Prospective emigrants were invited by proclamation of February 1815 to come forward and take advantage of this scheme. It was required that every male aged above 16 was at the time of departure to deposit £16 in the hands of government agents; for wives the deposit was two guineas, and children under 16 were to travel free. These sums were to be refunded two years later in Canada, provided that the travelers had shown their good faith by settling on their land. The purpose of the deposits was to prevent unscrupulous persons from using the scheme merely to get free passage to the United States. After arriving in Canada, each family of settlers was to be given one hundred acres of land; their male children, on reaching the age of 21, were each to get a similar grant. For the first six or eight months, rations were to be supplied to the settlers. Applicants were to supply evidence of good character. At a later stage, undischarged bankrupts and persons known to have been defrauding the revenue by illicit distilling were expressly barred from sharing in the scheme."