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Am Bratach No. 217
There are no photographs of John McKay McInlay to give us a picture of him and there are no family papers. His land in Achtoty and what remains of his house are now part of the neighbouring croft but his life, however obscure and distant it now seems, is part of his descendants’ inheritance and greatly valued by them. The story of his life emerged when my husband, William McKay, a great, great grandson of John McKay McInlay, and I began researching our families’ genealogy. When my husband was growing up, the family lived in a tenement on the waterfront at Leith but in earlier times had stayed in Newhaven and Granton, never far from the sea. It was in Leith that we began our search by asking the family for their recollections. Apart from the names of the previous three generations, we found very few family memories remained. William McKay, my husband’s father, knew his grandfather was Alexander McKay. He also had heard of a visit late one night from a Gaelic-speaking stranger thought to be a relative. There had been talk of the family coming from somewhere in Sutherland and of John McKay, Alexander’s first child, being sent to Sutherland when very young and remaining there. With only this to go on, we traced the family back as far as we could in what was then New Register House in Edinburgh. We reached the 1861 census and found my husband’s great, great grandfather, Alexander McKay in Leith, and found his marriage to Helen and the births of their children. The first baby born to Alexander and Helen was indeed a John McKay. Here was assurance that one of the family memories might be correct. We seemed to be on the right track. This was confirmed when we could find no trace of young John with Alexander’s family, after his birth. There was no record of the child dying, so one important clue seemed to be correct. Then we went back a generation to find the names of Alexander’s parents from his death certificate — John and Ann McKay. Here, however, the trail went cold and it seemed this was the point when Alexander McKay had left Sutherland to go south seeking work. But from where in Sutherland had he come? We knew only that Alexander’s parents were John and Ann McKay and that their son Alexander was born about 1836 or 1837. To identify the right John and Ann was like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack and we were looking for them before we had a computer and before the existence of the website, Scotland’s People. The only way for us to find John and Ann McKay was to search the 1841 and 1851 census returns for Sutherland and follow up birth and baptism records. The first family we found that seemed a possibility came from Truderscaig in the heights of Strathnaver but there was no sign of the little boy, John McKay. Another possible family was in Melness, but again there was no young grandson, John McKay. There was great excitement when we looked at a third couple, John and Ann McKay, in Lotts, Achtoty in Tongue, and saw an entry for the family in the 1871 census which included a grandson, John McKay, of the right age and born in Leith. When we looked at this family more closely, we found a son, Alexander, baptised at exactly the right time, leaving Achtoty, again at exactly the right time, settling, working and marrying in Leith. We had found the link between Sutherland and Leith. We continued searching for information about the family in Achtoty. We wanted to fill in the background of John and Ann McKay’s lives. Our research led us into the history of the parish of Tongue and the Province of Strathnaver, the land of the Mackays, from the seventeenth century, to the Sutherland family’s purchase of the estate of Reay in 1829 and the changes which followed. When we retired, and had more time, we began a major research project. We looked at the Sutherland papers in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh and in Stafford in England and the Reay papers in the National Archive in Edinburgh. Along the way, as we collated our findings for this wider study of Tongue and the Reay Country, a wealth of detail emerged about the life of John McKay McInlay fisherman and tenant of 18 Achtoty. We travelled with him through times of poverty, eviction and frustrated despair, family loss and emigration. To be continued nrxt month.
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