"There was never a central emigration register kept in Scotland of the many Scots who left for North America and Aurstalasia. Instead the ship's manifest, which listed all passengers, traveled with the ship and was lodged at the overseas port of entry. Some of the manifests were subsequently handed in to archives or libraries while others were simply lost. There has been a considerable worldwide effort in recent years to put on the web the details of these ships and their surviving passenger lists."
Lara: I know for myself that ships transporting our relatives all over the place is not really my speciality.
The being said...the compilation of ships known to have left Scottish ports is extremely important to this research as we wander through the mountains of information the world has to offer on The Past.
It helps us narrow down possibilities and get on track for pursuing specific leads instead of not having any direction!
So we have the year...the ships...emigrant info...and destinations...And we learned that it is proper English to italicize the names of ships.
1801
Dove
Scotland to Pictou, Nova Scotia, Canada
1801
Sarah
Scotland to Pictou, Nova Scotia, Canada
Through Cyndi's List, it is possible to find some transcribed passenger lists from these ships. On the internet I find another work done by Kristen McKay Willard for the ship Sarah. It shows that some infants were listed as "infants." It is possible that our Mary McAlpine was one of these infants with the Chisholms or McDonalds, etc.
1802
Friends
Helen
Jane
Lochaber, Scotland to Pictou, Nova Scotia, Canada
1803
Commerce
Perthshire, Scotland to Pictou, Nova Scotia, Canada
1803
The Polly
Isle of Skye and Hebrides to
Prince Edward Island, Canada
1803
The Dykes
Liverpool, England to Prince Edward Island, Canada
1803
Recovery
Fanny
Draper
Aurora
Pitts
Perthshire immigrants,
Greenock to New York
1804
Oughton
Scotland to Prince Edward Island, Canada
Are you getting excited yet? Just this much evidence to clear up distant confusion is very exciting to researchers.
1806
Spencer
Oban to Pictou, Nova Scotia, Canada
Very exciting! " Here's a passenger list of the Spencer in 1806 by Kristen McKay Willard
1806
Elizabeth and Ann
Thurso, Caithness to Nova Scotia, Canada
1806
Rambler
Thurso, Caithness to Nova Scotia, Canada
Let's see, there was something caught my eye in cruising around on the internet. There were four small children taken and reared by an Aunt Ann (who married John B. Floyd) who were erroneously assigned to Charles or William Stewart. These were children of Richard Stewart...
Anne Howe (born 11 Oct. 1810)
JOHN McALPIN (born 14 Jan. 1814)****
Charles Augustus (born 23 March 1813)
Mary Culbertson (born 11 August 1814)
Daniel Ayres
somebody Stewart
somebody Putnam
Wm. S Bolling of Petersburg, VA.
This information comes from a family Bible, a Floyd family bible in the possession of Mrs. D. Leon Wilson of Macon, Georgia. And Richard Stewart would've been just a bit older than Mary McAlpine. Although he died in 1815. There are Stewart Clan magazines!
1806
Humpreys
Tobermony, Mull to Nova Scotia
1806
Isle of Skye
Tobermony, Mull to Nova Scotia
1808
Clarendon
Tobermony, Mull to Nova Scotia
1813
Prince of Wales
Stromness, Orkney to Canada
1815
Atlas
Edinburgh settlers Greenock to Quebec
1815
Dorothy
Edinburgh settlers Greenock to Quebec
1815
Baltic Merchant
Edinburgh settlers Greenock to Quebec
1815
Eliza
Edinburgh settlers Greenock to Quebec
Their list is quite a bit longer and with more indispensable details...By 1815 our Mary McAlpine would've been 23 and probably not "young" nor a child and since we've found in Eliza Hitchcock's account of some Candee family information that her mother-in-law, Mary McAlpine Candee was "very young when she came from Scotland," we can whiddle down the time frame appropriately.
But with only the narrative account that we have we can't even really be sure if Mary McAlpine came directly from Scotland!
Here's a marvelous website called The Ship's List.
That address is: www.theshipslist.com/index.html
I myself spent a couple hours prowling around on the internet and was quite pleased to find so much work done in transcribing ships' passenger lists. There wasn't a ship for which I couldn't find at least some really good start on pretty full lists.
Like the National Archives points out about dates...in the old days, records were more scanty than fleshed out. Might have records of the main man associated with a group of women and children and the women and children aren't all named singularly. You can imagine, too, that being at sea was brutal, really hard on people...many people didn't live the length of the voyage and there had to have been some scrambling around of survivors--re-grouping and maybe changing the courses of their destinies in the course of their journeys.
I know that there was a vast improvement of travel by sea between the time of the Mayflower and Mary McAlpine's ship and in our cramped up research minds we're sort of blending the colonials with people around the millennial year of 1800. We want to squeeze Mary McAlpine and her American husband into our way back blog, so we're kind of considering colonials to be people born, busy with life pre-1820.
While the War of 1812 certainly pitted American v. English in a very brutal and nationalistic clash, up to that time, there was more fluidity between styles of colonials on the North American Continent. And we want to examine that more closely particularly because the McAlpines that we find in some preliminary research leads us into the territory of Loyalists, Royalists, and some of those lesser talked about family characteristics.
We weren't wholly unprepared to enter this territory because of an article by Gordon Markiewicz called "Tories in Oxford?"
In that article we first considered what it meant for family members with different characteristics to progress through the contradictory conditions of their time period as in maybe that happened in OUR family. Turns out, it did! We'd been so focused on the Revolutionary War victors in our research we just weren't really thinking clearly. And it seemed like, until the 21st century, it wasn't really fashionable to write a mixed nationality blog, like somehow us contemporaries were supposed to keep our mixed characteristics to ourselves. Per modern warfare I suppose, which relies heavily on national differences in the zone and which pretty stringently has defined traitor-ing along equally rigid lines between nationalities. Our contemporary brains were reluctant to go back in time and re-experience the atrocities and disjarring treatments between people.
Markiewicz: "Probably the sad and poignant story concerns Noah Candee. Born in 1736, this scion of the large Candee clan had an estate near the headwaters of Little River on Christian Street. In 1768 he joined the Congregational Church in Oxford along with his wife Martha. They had six children who 'were born subjects of Great Britain and all of them served in the Revolutionary Army' [quoting Baldwin's genealogy, 1882], and cousin David's son Samuel was a veteran of the Bunker Hill battle and a British prisoner. Noah, however, 'was a Tory, and no doubt lost his farm on that account' [Baldwin] due to confiscation by the State of Connecticut. More suffering followed, as 'his family was tabooed by the other Candees on that account' [Baldwin]"...."Probably of small comfort to Noah is the fact that another Oxford Candee, Dr. Enos, had his estate confiscated in 1781, for being 'a Tory in the Revolution' [Baldwin].
This was enough of an invite into thinking about this to consider if maybe Mary McAlpine was the child of McAlpin/es who had history with America previous to her coming here in 1792.
Also online I was reading about a Peter Drummond who moved to America about 1774 and was wrapped up in tensions between men who were loyalists and men who were becoming these new Americans.
Peter Drummond was jailed at Albany in 1776 and eventually escaped to Canada. Along his journey he settled into the company of Captain Daniel McAlpin at Saratoga Lake.
In 1783, the property of Capt. McAlpin was confiscated by the American government.
Highland tenants, Palatine Germans, and escaping Loyalists...oh my, there was much tramping through the forests.
Probably worth a "trip" to the Ontario Historical Society. And we might read something called the Haldimand Papers at the Canadian Archives at Ottawa to learn more.
We might figure out more about the McAlpin's Corps of American Volunteers in this puzzle too. In that we find out more about Sir William Howe. The Corps was raised by McAlpin for the Burgoyne expedition of 1777. Survivors of that campaign who were stationed at Quebec eventually amalgamated with the remnants of a Corps of Peter Jessup...and these men became the Loyal Rangers in 1781.
You'll notice of course that Anne HOWE is one of the names of those children associated with the Stewart family. Howe, of course, is one of the famous names in the revolutionary activity but considering how people survived their families and took care of each others' military fellows' families hasn't been an overly stated aspect of that revolutionary activity.
We want to post a teenily lengthy excerpt from Trevelyan's THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION here which tells the story of John Cartwright who'd worked with Lord Howe but who declined to re-join Howe in 1776 and come to fight in America. In the passage we get a better sense for the far-from-the-frontlines perspective...
pp 253-254 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (abridged 1964)
"By the year 1775 something had been heard of a man who, in the course of a very long and honoured career, did as much in defence of our political freedom as Granville Sharp accomplished for the cause of humanity. John Cartwright, the younger son of a Nottinghamshire squire, entered the Royal Navy in 1758 at a late age for a midshipman. He soon made up for lost time, and attracted such notice by activity and intelligence, joined to a singularly amiable and chivalrous character, that Lord Howe took him on to his ship, the Magnanime, which then was reputed the best school for a rising officer. Cartwright became a prime favourite with his captain,--if such a word can fairly be applied in the case of a chief the degree of whose favour was invariably determined by merit. Howe, who knew every man in his crew and every corner of his vessel, contrived special arrangements to ensure that the young fellow should live with congenial comrades, and that he should enjoy all possible facilities, which the space and the routine of a man-of-war would permit, for learning the theory of his profession. Cartwright, (as was likely to happen with Pitt for war minister, and Anson for First Lord of the Admiralty,) soon had a trial of that profession in its most practical and exciting shape. At the battle in Quiberon Bay he had the care of four guns on the lower deck; and, out of his twenty-six men, thirteen were swept down by one discharge. Lord Howe had the adversary's flag-ship, and two of her consorts, upon him at one and the same moment' and John Cartwright informed his friends at home that, more than once in the course of the engagement, he expected little less than to be diving for French cockles. When Howe was selected by Hawke to lead an attack on those ships of the enemy which had run for safety into the Vilaine river, Cartwright was one of the three officers who accompanied his Lordship in the boats. The Magnanime was kept at sea for the best part of two busy years, until the crew had to be at the pumps during the whole of every watch. At length Howe surrendered the command, and was succeeded by a very different kind of officer [The footnote here says, It would have been more profitable, (so Cartwright declared,) to be taken prisoner for a few months, and to have the advantage of learning to fence and talk French, than to serve under a captain who lingered about wherever he could get fresh meat and syllabubs, and who missed opportunities for a fight "the loss of which would make a parson swear."]; and the single thought of the young lieutenant was henceforward to attain such a proficiency in seamanship as would render him worthy of his luck if ever the day came for him to sail with Howe once more" (253-254 Trevelyan's THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, abridged 1964).
And we want to pass along some information available glanced at in some of the genealogical standards like, LOYALISTS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION...
In there we find a William McAlpine who was a printer and bookseller of Boston. He was an addresser of Hutchinson in 1774 and of Gage in 1775; proscribed and banished 1778; and during the siege of Boston he embarked with the British Army to Halifax and then went on to Great Britain and died at Glasgow in 1788.
There's Sabine's LOYALISTS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. I think it was in Volume 2 where we found Donald McAlpine, a Lt. in the NC volunteers; wounded in the battle of Camden, 1780; at NY 1782 with his family of four and deemed a Loyalist Associator. Eventually settled in Shelburne, Nova Scotia.
Anthony McAlpine was an officer under Sir John Johnson.
There was a William McApline in the Guides and Pioneers of New York State.
A John McAlpine who made way from New York to Nova Scotia and was granted 50 acres of land, one town and one water lot. This, we found out later on an episode of HISTORY DETECTIVE, was not uncommon.
And nothing in this blog post is really specific to our Mary McAlpine, it's more like example of how research can start out by looking with a wide view. Personally, I feel pressure to figure out Mary McAlpine because I've had correspondence with Candee contemporaries and I know that somebody's mother has been waiting a long time to solve this part of the story. But I haven't had the time or resources to dedicate to doing much more than this sort of toe-tipping.
Still typing in random notes from the paperwork...
There's a McAlpine Genealogy, 1730-1990
by Doris McAlpin Russell (Gateway Press, 1990)
probably key to read!
There's a web address: http://www.macalpineclan.com
We found a Mary McAlpin born 20 OCT 1792, res. Paisley Renfrewshire Scotland, parents Robert McAplin and Katherine Latta
And we have to extract the teeny bit of information about the mysterious Mary McAlpine from those accounts given to us from Eliza Hitchcock Candee!
It's ongoing.
It's been a common mistake to confuse the many Asa's in the Candee clan.
