Courtesy of Brian Boggs and Shirley McAnelly, this image is cropped from a larger scene from an oil painting. The original seemingly shows the ship in the middle of a regatta or a larger fleet going all parts of the compass. The Adam Lodge herself is in full sail while buffeted by high seas – if accurate an extremely uncomfortable experience for the passengers?

 How alike are you to your Irish or Highland Ancestor?

In the absence of family narrative to say what ancestors were really like, a proxy method has been devised to look at how Celtic traits have survived generations.  Find out more with Identity Exploration (no cost attached, based on PhD research, no Freudian quackery).

 http://www.identityexploration.com/ipseus_output.asp

Primordialism (identity that is formed by sense of personal history and attachment to a piece of soil or place of origin) is in the first two columns. Situationalism (identity does not depend on the past and is more to do with present characteristics and is in the ‘here and now’) is in other columns. 

A way of finding out a person’s current Q-Celt (Hebridean or Irish) identity, whether primordialist or situationalist, or some combination of both, is to measure the person’s identification with famous or notorious role models from the past in Ireland or the Scottish Highlands. 

For the Highlands, these are General Hugh MacKay, Colonel Gordon, Governor Macquarie and Doctor McNeill, as explained in the book (see Smashwords) ‘New Celts from Old Horizons’.   For Ireland, these are Dr William McNevin, Archbishop Troy, Ambrose McGuigan and Viscount Castlereagh.

The purpose of the exercise is to show how  identification with these characters can be mirrors to a person’s own current Q-Celt (Irish or Highland) identity.

How to Find Out Even More
Place your anonymised request on this page (your email address will register you with the administrator of the site who will get back to you).

BREAKING NEWS

 ‘The Sea is Wide – New Celts from Old Horizons’ , the companion volume to this website, is again available again on Amazon and Smashwords as a Kindle ebook (price £4), downloadable onto Kindle, iPad, iPhone, PC, Mac, Blackberry, Android and many more. A hundred copies have already been downloaded free by visitors so all future copies will require to be paid for, in deference to the contributors to the volume.

. http://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/75880/120/the-sea-is-wide-new-celts-from-old-horizons

Sample downloads at no cost can also be viewed and  give a flavour of the contents of this book which will shortly also be for sale in paper version at National Trust outlets in Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere. The contributors are all highly acknowledged experts in their field.  If you find there are page layout formatting problems in the ebook version of the download, this is due to some quirk with Smashwords.  Download it instead or as well in that case as the PDF version (works OK with ipad and Kindle as well) at no extra cost. The chapters will then appear in their proper page format exactly as you would expect.

Target Readership

The hope is that the book will have a broad appeal to thousands of family researchers in US, Canada, Australia and at home, as up to 60% of ancestry tourists to the British Isles from abroad declare an interest in knowing more about the social history of the times in which their ancestors lived.  This is a very considerable number as about 120,000 visitors come  from North America to Ireland in an average high-season month, to take one example,  with similar numbers for Scotland.

The book will give both sedentary and peripatetic readers a better informed sense of that part of their identity that is Irish or Scottish Highlander, albeit they may have accrued a different ethnic or national foreground. It will present the broad sweep of social and personal circumstances that prevailed upon those  ancestors who were ‘forced’  to emigrate and those who ‘chose’ to stay.  An attentive reader will pick up that there is little in this book about the famines of the 1840s – surely the most obvious cause of mass emigration (more so from Ireland than Scotland) to the New World? The famines have been left out because the aim of  the book is to explore the reasons for emigration at times when the element of choice was still a factor.

The book also explores how that essential part of personal identity which is ethnic can be lost when people leave their ancestral home. But long after an ancestor has deceased, family roots still run deep and descendants who are five generations on and oceans removed often still continue the search. The book explores the relationships between ethnic identity and the limited number of possible responses when people are faced with catastrophic scenarios such as occurred in Ireland and Scotland during the period 1798-1858. These dilemmas and responses are universal and the ability of people today to identify and empathise with kith and kin from previous generations is what keeps sense of ethnic identity alive.

The issues are even more pertinent today wherever there is a clash between cultures that may have to  compete to find their place. Some people accept a strained co-existence with a new culture that is ‘here to stay’; some adopt an alien set of social values and mores wholesale; others come to be displaced or removed, often at great distances. Or conciliation may become possible  in a gradual manner with passage of time. Some people retreat instead into their geographical or psychological hinterlands. In extreme form, change is not only unaccepted but entrenchment in older ways becomes even more pronounced, or there may be outright rebellion. All these outcomes are illustrated within the book.

Editor
Dr Donald MacFarlane

External Evaluators
Prof Brian Graham (UU)*
Prof Jim Hunter (UHI)**
Dr Eric Kaufmann (Birkbeck and Harvard)

 *  University of Ulster
** University of the Highlands and Islands

Line up of contributors

Compromised Identity 1798-1858
Highland Diaspora Prof. Eric Richards PhD Adelaide
The Big House Dr. Annie Tindley PhD  Glasgow
A Hole in the Fence  Prof. John Sheets PhD Missouri
Conflicted Identity 1798-1858
Ceathrar air an Urlar Dr. Donald MacFarlane PhD Belfast
A Price on His Head Peter Gallagher Sydney
Young Ireland Prof. Christine Kinnealy PhD New Jersey
The Murder of Annie Beaton Dr Douglas Malcolm PhD PEI
Displaced Identity 1798-1858
The Adam Lodge Brian Boggs Canberra
The Highland Soldier Prof. Edward Spiers PhD Leeds
Ethnic Violence in Conception Bay  Prof. Willeen Keough PhD Vancouver
Oppressed Identity 1798-1858
Base and Clever Prof. Malcolm Prentis  PhD Canberra
Rogues and Fools Dr. Christine Wright PhD  Canberra
Three Hundred Lashes Merle O’Donnell Brisbane
Reconstructed Identity 1858-
John 1678 Victor Barnett Ohio, U.S.A 
Irish Bamboo Dr. Chad Habel PhD Adelaide
Lost Places Dr. Carol Glover  PhD  Melbourne
Present Pasts  Dr.Laurie Gourievidis PhD Clermont-Ferrand, France
Loosen the Knot Dr. Donald MacFarlane PhD Belfast

An informal writing style has been adopted throughout.  The text of the book  has a length equivalent to over 250 A4 pages, with close on a thousand references – all presented in an informal and non-intrusive manner to encourage readers into further study.

At its peak after 1840, the Sutherland Estate was owned by the largest landowners in western Europe and the eighth richest patrician family in Britain, that of the Duke of Sutherland. The family endured the worst possible public criticism and exposure following the Sutherland Clearances and it attracted the ire of no less a figure than Karl Marx. He argued that ” the person who stood at the head of this usurpation of property was a female Mehmet Ali who had digested well her Malthus – the Countess of Sutherland”. He and others argued that no amount of support for anti-slavery or sacks of seeds sent as relief could assuage the guilt the Sutherlands should feel for their treatment en masse of the ordinary crofter. The onslaught was only partly assuaged by the equally public support from their American friend and visitor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, authoress of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’.

The Big House  PDF download will be on Amazon Kindle or Smashwords  from 20th July 2011 (see above).

Author: Dr. Donald MacFarlane

Ethnic identity has been explored within this book from the standpoint of accurate knowledge and faithful interpretation of historical events. This chapter offers up hypotheticals and counterpoints to some of the major themes embedded within each section and they are presented in such a way as to be mildly provocative, questioning or nuanced. This device may encourage the reader to return to each chapter to consider afresh whether Celtic identity is in a terminal state of decline, in a state of regrowth and resurgence, a mere confection or  a symbol of the past adopted with nostalgia and pride? The reader is also introduced to a diagnostic method that helps to determine current ethnic identity.

Loosen the Knot Kindle or Smashwords PDF Download Available (see above).

Author: Dr. Laurie Gourievidis. Latest publication, ‘The Dynamics of Heritage’.

Few events in modern Scottish history have as strong a resonance as the Highland Clearances which have elicited images and emotions that have sustained artists, writers and politicians. They have now disappeared from living memory but their shadow hangs heavily, as they signify the culmination and transformation of this part of Scotland. They altered the map of the region, emptying its straths and thinning out its population. They also resulted in emigratory waves to colonial lands and they stand as a foundational event for those who set up new homes in foreign climes. Over time, many memorials have been erected in the Highlands and Islands - particularly those of the Land War period, but also emigrants.

Kindle Amazon or Smashwords PDF Download available (see above).

Author: Prof. Malcolm Prentis. Latest publication, ‘The Scots in Australia’.

A Scot himself, a landed gentleman and traveller, Alexander Marjoribanks observed of his felonious countrymen in Australia in 1847:

‘ A man is banished from Scotland for a great crime, from England for a small one, and from Ireland, morally speaking for no crime at all. … Both in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, Scotch convicts are considered the worst, and English the best. This seems to arise not so much from the laws of the two countries being so essentially different, as in their being differently administered; the punishment for minor crimes in particular, being infinitely more severe in England than in Scotland. Hence hundreds are transported annually from England, for offences which, in Scotland, would be punished by sixty days’ confinement in jail or Bridewell…In Scotland…they are mostly old offenders before they are transported’.

Three years later, this impression was confirmed by the conservative jurist Dr Archibald Allison: ‘It has generally been observed, by those practically acquainted with the working of the transportation system in the colonies, that the Irish convicts were generally the best, and the Scotch beyond all question, the worst who arrived’. This seemed a puzzle to those who esteemed the free settlers from the two countries in reverse order. Allison put it down to the superior legal system north of the Tweed. ‘The Scotch law,’ he continued, ‘administered almost entirely by professional men, and on fixed principles, has long been based on the principle of transporting persons only who were deemed irreclaimable in this country’.

‘Base and Clever’ Kindle Amazon or Smashwords  Download Now Available (see above).

Ethnic identity is not an artifact that the emigrant stows among the baggage, like a family heirloom to be unpacked at the end of the journey – a solid, unchanging link to the old ways. Rather, ethnicity is an ongoing process of intercultural dialogue through which difference is created, redefined, and maintained. This conversation of ethnicity involves expressions of inclusion and exclusion whereby a given group essentializes its own cultural identity vis-à-vis that of an ‘other’ group or groups. So the ethnic group does not exist in isolation; it needs an ethnic other in order to position itself. Such was the forum that developed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Conception Bay, Newfoundland. The two groups that predominated were Protestants from the West of England and Catholics from the southern counties of Ireland. Both groups came to the island to pursue opportunity in the Newfoundland cod fishery, and on occasion, tensions flared between the two.

Ethnic Violence in Conception Bay  Amazon Kindle or Smashwords PDF Download Now Available (see above).

After the Stewart rebellions of 1715 and 1745, recruitment drives reaped a rich harvest of soldiers for the British Army from the Highlands of Scotland. They became particular favourites in the telling of Sir Walter Scott and Queen Victoria. Detailed accounts are given of actions, many resulting in the awards of VCs,  during the Indian Mutiny and in the Crimea.

 ‘Highland Soldier’ Amazon  Kindle or Smashwords PDF Download Now Available (see above).

This chapter tells the story of events leading up to the rape and murder of Annie Beaton. As a single mother who was simply exercising her right to travel the king’s highway without being accosted or worse, the reaction of a closed Gaelic community in PEI said much about values at the time. It would be considered shocking today in its covering up and protection of the perpetrators. Preservation of a way of life seems to have mattered more than the prosecution of natural justice and the stain lives still in the collective memory of PEI Islanders today.

  ‘Annie Beaton’  PDF as Amazon Kindle or Smashwords Download (see above) from 20th July 2011.

In July 1848 a nationalist uprising took place in Ireland.  Unlike the revolutions that were sweeping through Europe in that year, the Irish rebellion was located not in a capital city or major town, but in a private house near to the small village of Ballingarry in County Tipperary. It was over within a few hours, the insurgents being defeated by a small local police force.  The leaders of the 1848 rising, though unsuccessful in achieving their aims, provided an important link between the insurgents of 1798 and those of 1916. Through their idealism and non-sectarianism they presented a vision of a united, non-sectarian, Ireland that has remained elusive up to this day. The 1848 rising may have lasted only a few hours, but its legacy has resonated into the early twenty-first century.

  ‘Young Irelanders’  Amazon Kindle or Smashwords PDF Download Now Available (see above).

By the mid-19^th century, Highlanders were to be found in every part of the ‘Anglosphere’- not only in the south of Scotland and England, but also in India, North America and the Antipodes.   In Australasia, there were  identifiable groups of Highlanders  in New England, in the south-east of South Australia, in Gippsland and the Western District of Victoria, a few in Western Australia and some in tropical Queensland. And, of course, in New Zealand they flourished in several places but most famously at Waipu in the North Island. Whether Highlanders abroad sustained especially cohesive identities, or whether they punched above or below their weight  in their new destinations, are difficult questions to answer.

 ‘Highland Diaspora’  Amazon Kindle or Smashwords Download Now Available (see above).