My McKinnon Family

 

When I started to research the McKinnon side of my family in 1999, the easiest way to access information about them was a set of CDs of the 1881 Census issued by the Church of Latter Day Saints. Here I found my great grandmother and all her siblings working as house servants (the girls) or farm servants (the boys).  Meanwhile her parents John Mckinnon and Mary Barron were at home in Petty, Inverness-shire looking after 3 illegitimate grandchildren.

The McKinnon (or MacKinnon) family originated on the islands of Mull, Coll, and Tiree n the Hebrides and later Skye and Rum.  For hundreds of years the MacKinnons held offices of importance in both the military and civil administrations of the Isles. A MacKinnon chief was the marshal of the island fleet that transported Robert Bruce and his army at the start of the campaign that ended at Bannockburn in 1314. MacKinnon chiefs were respected members of the Council of the Isles and from 1357 until 1498 the MacKinnon clan supplied the abbots and priors for the monastery on Iona.

After the Act of Union between England and Scotland, Clan MacKinnon supported the Jacobite cause especially in 1715 and 1745. Following those failed uprisings, the clan members were reduced to poverty. Their land was sold off and many emigrated. The Highland Clearances, moving people to make room for sheep, caused more McKinnons to scatter round the globe.

The first McKinnon we can trace in our family is William MacKinnon, a weaver, living in Stronaba, Kilmonivaig, Invernesshire.  He and his wife, Ann Cameron had two children, Christian (female) and John MacKinnon. By 1841 William had died and Ann McKinnon (Cameron) was in misery (on charity). In 1851 she was listed as a parish pauper. Later that year John, a labourer, married Mary Barron, a servant maid working at Glenfintaig House, in Kilmonivaig. 

John McKinnon and his wife Mary, who spoke Gaelic and English, soon moved to Elgin, Moray where their first 2 children were born, but by 1854 when their son William McKinnon was born, they were living in the village of Petty on the edge of the Moray Firth near to the town of Inverness.  John worked as a railway surfaceman until he died of a heart attack aged 82. His wife Mary Barron died 8 years later in Inverness and was buried at Tomnahurich Cemetery in Inverness.  Of the 10 children of John McKinnon and Mary Barron, my great grandmother Eliza was their 6th child.

Eliza was later called Elizabeth. Her son Alexander Stewart was born in 1879 when she was 17. By 1881 she was working as a nursemaid in Inverness but at some point, during the next 7 years she moved to work in Dunbartonshire over on the west coast. There she met Northern Irishman, Robert John Hughes, a mason, but by the time they married in 1888, he was a postman. On the 1891 census they are listed living in the village of Row (Rhu) on the Gareloch. The couple had 9 children including Elizabeth Hughes, my grandmother born in 1900. Of Eliza McKinnon’s 7 sisters, two, Catherine and Mary, moved to Australia with their husbands, the two brothers, William and John, were farm labourers and Johanna never married.

Eliza McKinnon