Welcome!
This family history site is a work in progress. The internet is a perfect location for this study - accessible to far-flung cousins and easy to update with newly discovered material. You can contribute by contacting me with stories, photos, documents, or anything that applies to these folks. As well, please let me know of errors or typos on these pages.
Who's included?
Descendants of two couples: Hector McLean & Mary McGillivray and Angus McKinnon & Mary McFadyen. There are no details about living people although their names may appear as a child in their parents' family section or on a chart.
Researching these families is a challenge, as a huge number of people from Mull came to the same areas in Canada. A handful of given names appear in every generation: Mary, Elizabeth, Isabella, Catherine, Christina, Flora, Euphemia, Archibald, Angus, Alexander, Hector, John. Sorting all these people out is grand puzzle, indeed.
Finding a person on the site
Find someone via the surname index, the charts, or the search tab, all accessible from the top menu.
There is an individual page for each person for whom I have a reasonable amount of information, which is arranged as follows:
- Name and birth/death dates
- Parents' names
- Person's relationship, if any, to the immigrant ancestors - Hector McLean &/or Angus McKinnon
- An "Extended Family" button which opens up a diagram of the subject's siblings, children, parents, grandparents, and great grandparents
- Links to charts on which they appear
- Family section, listing spouse(s) and known children
- The main section - a chronology of life events
- Source citations
- A link to contact me with information, photos, corrections, or just to let me know you are interested!
Other areas to Explore
From the top menu you can also connect to
- Surname Index - which lists everyone who has their own information page
- Charts - which illustrate ancestors and descendants of key people
- Images - thumbnails linking to larger images and individual's pages
- What's New? - major additions and changes to the site
- Search this site by name or place
Names & Dates & Places
There is an enormous repetition of names in these Gaelic-speaking families and there was not the consistency of spelling that we now enjoy. Christina may be found as Christian, Christy, Chrissie, Teena, and so on. The surnames McGillivray, McFadyen, McLean, McKinnon were recorded dozens of ways. As spelling became more set in the 1900s, we find that some branches of the families chose to use Mac rather than Mc in their surnames. On this site, I have transcribed the spelling as it was written in each source record.
Ages and birthdays are highly unreliable! It is often impossible to determine exact birthdates. Sometimes a baptism date must suffice, assuming church records can be found. Birth registration began in Ontario in 1869 and compliance was spotty for many, many years. Sometimes ages were under-reported early on and years added generously as a person reached a venerable old age. Census records were frequently inconsistent and even the Canadian 1901 and 1911 censuses which recorded exact birthdates are often off by a year (apparently the enumerator did a quick subtraction of age in his head). When a person's birthdate is unknown but can be approximated from census or other records, it is given as a circa date, which is plus or minus a year or two. Even when a precise date is given, it must be evaluated against the sources consulted.
The most important consideration in constructing family trees is to confirm the links from generation to generation, e.g. is the Archibald McLean who married in this town the same Archibald McLean who was a child over in this other town? By gathering and evaluating a wide variety of evidence, I am reasonably confident that the links in our tree are correct, albeit incomplete. However, family trees are always open to revision as new records are found. There are many people in these pages who disappeared from sight once they became young adults, probably setting off westward on their own. It is much simpler to trace families back in time than to follow the next generation forward. By publishing this work, I hope to be contacted by descendants who can supply the links.
Place names have evolved, e.g. Upper Canada to Canada West to Ontario. I have mostly used the present day name for clarity and indicated where records differ.
Odds & ends
Anything in [square brackets] is an explanatory note that I have added.
Icons found on the site:
this person is my direct ancestor
indicates there is a portrait of this person
indicates a person whose parents have not been identified
click on this icon to see a transcribed document
The information displayed on these pages will necessarily change as research continues. Although great care has been taken, I do not guarantee the accuracy of all information on this website.
By checking the citations, you can see where a particular piece of information was found and evaluate how likely it is to be correct. I have not cited every source that supports a fact...there might be 3 census records that say a person was born in Ontario but I typically don't cite them all.
If you are using any of the information presented on this site for your own genealogical research, please remember to cite accordingly. Something along the lines of "McLean & McKinnon Genealogy, online, http://genealogy.kolthammer.org/McLean&McKinnon-o/, accessed date" would be suitable.
If you would like to hear about updates to this site, please click on the compiler's name on any page to contact me. Or, send a message just to let me know that you are also a descendant of Hector & Mary or Angus & Mary.
Acknowledgements
- Numerous correspondents over the past twenty years, as noted in the citations and "What's New" section
- The developers and supportive user community of The Master Genealogist and Second Site, programs which were used to produce this site.