Alexander Mackenzie (1) (1838–1898)

This, like many of its kind, is rather stultifying if one attempts to read it straight through. It's more of a reference book, I suppose, though the awkward formatting from the import to ebook* didn’t help. Footnotes often showed up in mid-page and sometimes, mid-sentence, and it wasn’t always clear what it was actually referring to.

Even so, skimming through and reading random anecdotes and reported stories is VERY interesting and by turns amusing and depressing in a sad, human folly kind of way. Tales of fratricide, witchcraft trials, poisonings, burnings of homes and towns, and the rather constant making and breaking of alliances are given rather matter-of-factly along with marriages and birthdates.

This book, and histories of other clans by Mackenzie, may well give a better glimpse of the citizen historian-genealogist who tended to write (and read) these books at the close of the 19th centuries than a real sense of the people of its pages. One can tell that the author, who died before the manuscript was finished, sincerely tried to give an objective accounting, quoting large blocks of primary sources when possible. The son who finished it may well have done the same. They were born to the neighboring clan who allied with and fought against Clan Munro throughout their mutual history, inter-marrying when not burning each other’s houses down. If the book is any indication, this was true for all the Highland clans, and indeed, probably most of European - and let’s face it, world – history. The same stories over and over again of wars, marriage bargaining, trade agreements, and court accusations. It’s the little snippets of everyday life of people that make it engaging, at least for me, and I suppose that’s where history and genealogy meet for most people. In conclusion, I’ll paste in a random section to give the potential reader a feel for the book:

He died at Milntown Castle " in great extravagance and confusion," before 1522, and was buried in the east end of the Church of Kilmuir-Easter, near the Allan burying-ground. In 1522 William Mackintosh, XIII. of Mackintosh gave John Malcolmson, his nephew, the occupation of Connage of Petty, " that thereby John might get the marriage of Effie Dunbar, relict of Andrew Monroe of Milntown, thinking thereby to reclaim the said John from his loose and wicked courses-,"*

It is said that Andrew, after issuing one of his arbitrary orders that all his female servants should during the harvest

* History of the Mackintoshes and Clan Chat fan, p. 184. 18

operations appear one year in a state of nudity, was coming out of his residence to see that his commands had been given effect to, when he fell down his own stairs and broke his neck, probably the result of "great extravagance and profusion " in the use of his viands immediately before. The field in which his female servants are said to have been at the time at work is still pointed out between the old Castle of Milntown and the shore of Cromarty Firth, directly opposite the modern mansion house of Tarbat.* He was succeeded by his eldest son, IV. George Monro, to whom Dingwall of Kildun, by deed dated at Inveran, the 20th of April, 1541, sold his half of the lands of Ferncosky in Braechat, parish of Creich ; and on the 22nd of June following James V. granted him a Crown charter of the same lands.

*I read an epub version, not the listed Kindle, though I suspect the source for both was a scanned version of the original.
… (más)