A shorter version of
this article originally appeared in the Journal of the
Aberdeen and North East Scotland Journal in the year 2000. It
has since been updated and expanded and appears here with the
kind permission of the Author.
McCombie - A One-Name Study
(By Hamish M. McCombie)
Foreword
& Introduction
How does one get into a one-name
study - a never-ending search for people with the same
surname, all the while ignoring family members who do not
happen to have that name? The answer, as far as I am
concerned, is simply that I fell into it through the process
of looking for my own ancestors in Scotland and noting all
those with the same name that turned up in the hope that they
might fit somewhere in the family
tree.
My father, James George (Hamish) McCombie, a
delayed World War II victim, died in 1947 when I was eight
years old. As newly-weds in 1936, he and my mother had moved
from Rhynie in west Aberdeenshire to Longside, near Peterhead
in the north east of the county where my brother and I grew
up. At that time it was a world away from the “home” of the
McCombies on upper Donside where my father’s family came from.
As my paternal grandparents had died before I was born, my
mother, herself part of a large family, gradually lost touch
with most of my father’s kin. I left Scotland after graduating
from Aberdeen University in 1960 and a few decades later, all
of which have been spent abroad, in East Africa, Switzerland
and France, I realised with some regret that I knew very
little about the origins of my name and the people who shared
it. I resolved, after some prodding from my sister-in-law, to
do something about it.
A few days in New Register House in Edinburgh soon established my descent from a Joseph
McCombie (c 1730–1798) who married Isobel Gray in
Logie-Coldstone, in the south west of Aberdeenshire, in May
1756. But I was immediately struck by the large number of
McCombies that appeared in the indexes - were they all part of
the same family, descendants of Joseph? Apart from my own
immediate family and a few cousins, I had never met another
McCombie and had imagined the name to be quite rare, confined
to a single family in the Alford area where my father had been
born and raised. I was soon to be enlightened. For a start,
had I bothered to look, I would have found over 100 listed in
the Aberdeen(shire) telephone directory of
the late 1980s.
It was soon clear that all McCombies were not of
the same family, but I had gathered so many names that I
became intrigued by the question of who was related to whom
and began to match names and places and dates in groups and
families. I have been doing this spasmodically for about 25
years with the broad objective of seeking out all McCombies
everywhere and establishing their relationship to each other.
It would appear that there are enough of us to make it a real
challenge and few enough to make it feasible. Being very much
an amateur genealogist and historian, I do not consider this
exercise in any way to be a history of the clan; such
historical information about early McCombies and the origins
of the name that I have been able to gather from a variety of
sources, is given only as background to discussing the various
branches that have been identified.
It should be noted that the study refers only to
descendants still bearing the surname McCombie. The births of
daughters are noted but when they marry and change names a
line is drawn, unless any have sons born out of wedlock who
retain the mother’s surname. On the other hand, females who
marry a McCombie are considered part of that family but their
own ancestry is not discussed. Neither has any attempt been
made to consider those other clan names having similar origins
such as McColm, McComas, McComb(e) and
McComish.
Initially, I concentrated on the information
available in New Register House – the Old Parish Registers,
census returns, the International Genealogical Index, and the
statutory registers of births marriages and deaths. These were
supplemented by sources such as compilations of Monumental
Inscriptions, and other information available in the Offices
of the Aberdeen and North East Scotland
Family History Society. But it was not long before I had to
move on to similar sources in other countries – England,
Australia, the USA and the like – and became heavily dependent
on information and research done by contacts in far away
places. Originally conducted laboriously by snail-mail these
exchanges became one of the most enjoyable parts of the
exercise. Fortunately, the advent of e-mail and the Internet
has made it much easier to conduct research “together”,
sharing work and exchanging information and ideas as the
investigations progress.
It is a curious fact, however, that those “at
home” in Aberdeenshire have been much more reluctant to part
with information. (In the late 1980’s, letters to some 75
McCombies in the North East elicited no more than seven
replies). Is this a reticence born out suspicion for my
motives, or just apathy and a lack of interest? It is natural,
I suppose, for those living far from the home country to want
to know more about their ancestry but the difference is
striking. Perhaps as a consequence of the region’s relative
isolation, and having its own dialect, there exists a sort of
cultural self-sufficiency and wariness of those from the
outside – not that this prevented the region in the 19th and
20th centuries from being one of the country’s most highly
literate with a well developed awareness of national and
international issues of the day. Nevertheless, the people are
notably cautious about revealing anything much about
themselves, from which stems, perhaps, their fabled reputation
for thriftiness.
I have gleaned much of the historical
information from William McCombie Smith’s Memoir of the Families of
McCombie and Thoms published in 1890, and from A History of
Logie-Coldstone and the Braes of Mar (1896), by John G.
Michie. Frank McCombie’s A Memoir of a McComie
Family (1995)and miscellaneous articles, written mostly by
the historian and genealogist Roger Pye, which appeared in the
early issues of the magazine of the Clan McThomas Society,
also provided valuable background. From The Scottish World-
History and Culture of Scotland, published by Harold N.
Abrams Inc, New York and from Farm Life in North East Scotland 1840 - 1914 by Ian Carter, I learned much
about agricultural practices in Scotland in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. I am happy to
acknowledge the countless clansmen and women in all corners of
the English-speaking world who have been wonderfully helpful
and cooperative. I owe a very large debt of gratitude to the
indefatigable Bonnie Curry in Queensland,
Australia, to Peter and Jeff
McCombie in London, UK, and
especially to the late Gerald (Jerry) McCombie in Florida, USA, who sadly
left us in 2002. It has also been a privilege to share the
wealth of fascinating detail of the McCombies in the West
Indies resulting from the painstaking research of Alan Samuels
in England and Tannis Pond in British Columbia, and similarly
on the McCombies in India by Jill Grey in
England.
None of the above, nor indeed anyone else,
should be held in any way responsible for errors of fact or
interpretation that may appear in this paper. The
responsibility is mine and mine
alone.
What’s in a Name – A Brief
History
The name
McCombie is what might be called the “modern” version of the
name McComie, or one of its spelling variations (MacOmie,
MacCommie, etc), which was the phonetic form of the gaelic
MacThomaid, the patronymic of Tomaidh. MacThomaid, was
actually pronounced MacHommie, with the cH having a slightly
throaty sound as in the Scottish pronunciation of “loch”. The
small “c” in McComie is a corruption of the apostrophe that it
gradually replaced towards the end of the 19th century.
Originally, the name was written M’Comie or MacComie. The
insertion of the “b”, for reasons unknown, appears to have
begun in Aberdeenshire in the middle of the 17th century.
Given the notoriously variable spelling of church clerks, it
was not always consistent but it slowly took hold, family by
family, and then region by region, until by the beginning of
the 20th century few McComies remained (a notable exception
being a family in USA which originated in Perthshire, later
Midlothian, and remains to this day untainted by the
“Aberdeenshire corruption”). The vast majority now spell the
name McCombie although at least two families in
USA and one in England, having earlier been McCombie, have
reverted to MacCombie which may be considered to be the more
correct now that the apostrophe is all but defunct. Strictly,
the small “c” should be written in the place of the
apostrophe, that is the upper half of the space between the
two capital letters, as it invariably was until the advent of
typing machines with which it is much simpler to place the “c”
in the lower half as a normal lower case
letter.
All
this may be said to have begun towards the end of the 15th
century when a splinter group of the Clan Chattan McIntoshes
migrated across the Grampian mountains from Badenoch in the
west of Scotland to Glen Shee in the North East corner of
Perthshire where it established itself as a separate clan
under its chief, Tomaidh Mor (Big Tommy) McIntosh. In the
original feu-charter (right to the use of the land in
perpetuity) of 7th September 1568, the McIntosh McComies are
described as being ab
antiquo tenants and possessors of Finnegand in Glenshee
implying that they had inhabited these lands for many years
previously. Although in 1587, when the government in Edinburgh enrolled the clans, the clan was given
the anglicised name of MacThomas, succeeding chiefs continued
to call themselves McComie or McIntosh – names which were used
interchangeably.
For 160
years or so the clan prospered in Glen Shee to the extent that
in 1652 its seventh chief, the remarkable and much celebrated
John McComie (Iain Mor), was in a position to purchase the
barony of Forter in the adjoining Glen Isla in Forfarshire.
Many legends based on the fighting skills, courage and
strength as well as the compassion and generosity of McComie
Mor, as he was generally known, have passed into family
folklore which regards him as a real highland hero. A few
years later, however, in the wake of the Civil and Covenanter
Wars and with the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660,
McComie of Forter, having originally fought with the Royalists
under the Duke of Montrose but later switched his support to
the Parliament and Cromwell, found himself on the wrong side.
He became a marked man and life was made very difficult for
the clan. It gradually lost much of its land provoking a long
and bloody feud with its neighbours and
fellow McIntosh clan members, the Farquharsons. This ended
with the death of two of M’Comie Mor’s sons who were killed in
a skirmish in 1673 and of the chief himself who died a broken
man in 1676. Almost landless and leaderless, the clan split up
and scattered, some moving north to Aberdeenshire, then
further north and west to Banffshire, Nairn and Inverness,
where the name McComie – later McCombie – became prevalent.
Others moved south and east often taking the name Thom, McThom
or Thomson, while some migrated to the extreme South West of
Scotland and to Northern Ireland
where the names McColm, McComish and McComb(e) were
adopted.
These were not, however, the first migrations of
the McComies: they seem to have been established in Aberdeen(shire) in particular, but also in Inverness and Perthshire, long before the break up of the
clan. As early as 1556, for example, we find an assize upon
Ferquhair McCombquhy (sic) summoned at Elgin
in Morayshire (Dr Black, The surnames of Scotland,
1946). Among the earliest recorded settlements was that in
or near Logie-Coldstone in south-west Aberdeenshire, less than
40 miles as the crow flies from Glen Isla. As detailed below,
we know that a George Makcomye of Nether Ruthven in the parish
of Logie (which was annexed to the parish of Coldstone in
1618) was a Kirk elder in April 1597. In order to reach that
status he must have already been in the parish for a number of
years.
Although McComies were no doubt present in
Aberdeen at an earlier date, the records of 6th February 1624
of the Aberdeen Sheriff Court inform us of the “loosing of
arrestment” (freeing of obligation) to Elspeth Ross in Coull
(adjoining Logie-Coldstone) of a John Mackomie, Chamerlane
(steward) to the Marquis of Huntly. A little later, John
McComye, servant to Hugh Lord Lovat and yet another John
McComyes, servant to the Earl of Seaforth, were made Honorary
Burgesses of Aberdeen in 1634 and 1636 respectively. The first
McCombie, with a “b”, appears in the OPRs of Old Machar, Aberdeen, in 1642 and 1644 when the children of a
John Mackombie were baptised. By the end of that century it
appears that every family in Aberdeen had
inserted the “b”. As far as can be ascertained from the Parish
Registers there were McComies in Perthshire in 1641 and,
curiously, a son of John McCombie and Elizabeth Sheepherd (sic) was baptised in
Fife as early as 1675. The counties of Inverness and
Moray were also home to McComies in the 1650s with the name
McCombie beginning to come into fashion about a century later,
at around the same time that it did in Aberdeen County. Even in Edinburgh, there was a William McComie who married in 1669.
Thus, while the accepted history of the McComies in Glenshee
and Glen Isla is undoubtedly authentic it is by no means the
whole story. It seems that members of the clan, for whatever
reasons, moved and settled in other parts of Scotland - and
not always next door in Aberdeenshire or Perthshire – well
before the dispersal of the clan around
1676.
The break up of the clan was but a small part of
the catalogue of misfortune and disaster that befell the
people of Scotland, especially the
Highlands, in the turbulent times of the latter half
of the 17th century up to the middle of the 19th century. The
Covenanter wars, the rebellions of 1715 and ’45 and their
savage aftermath, changing agricultural practices and the
infamous highland clearances, disease, famine and widespread
poverty, all led to emigration on a large scale. Many McComies
were among those who sought a better life in England, in the Americas
(a David McComie was in Woburn, Massachusetts
as early as 1651) and later in Australia and New Zealand, as
well as in most outposts of the burgeoning British
Empire in Victorian times. This study has the general
objective to identify as many as possible of those still named
McCombie today and, through tracing their ancestry, to try to
establish their relationship to each
other.
Research in official and unofficial records,
supplemented by a wealth of information and invaluable
assistance provided by fellow McCombies throughout the world,
has resulted in the identification of about a dozen branches
comprising some 4000 names about half of which are current.
More than half of the names belong to two or three branches
that can be traced back with some certainty at least to the
late 17th century. There are of course several smaller
branches and “twigs”, which have not so far been attached or
proved to be related to any larger group, as well as dozens of
individual McCombies about whose family origins nothing is
known to this researcher. (The reader may be reminded here
that the study refers only to descendants still bearing the
name McCombie. The births of daughters are noted but when they
marry and change names a line is drawn unless any have sons
born out of wedlock who retain the mother’s
surname).
Descendants of John M’Comie of Forter
(c1607-1676)
The genealogy of the McCombies up to the end of
the 19th century, including the story of John M’Intosh alias M’Comie of
Finnegand and Forter in Glen Isla, generally known as the M’Comie Mor, is
entertainingly told and well documented in a Memoir of the Families of
M’Combie and Thoms, compiled from history and tradition by
William M’Combie Smith and published in 1890. (It is
instructive that throughout the Memoir the apostrophe rather
than the small “c” is used. Hereinafter, in conformity with
modern practice, the “c” is
preferred).
From this scholarly study we learn that that the
original charter in 1568 was granted in favour of one John
(McIntosh) McComy Mor, his wife Janet Rattrey and son John
McComy Mor junior. From other documents regarding the
property, including its sale in 1652, we find that John McComy
jnr. was married to a Janet Farquarson and that they had at
least one son, Alexander, who became the father of John
McComie, the
McComie Mor, born in the early 1600s. To quote McCombie Smith
it was in the last McComie Mor’s lifetime “that the family
rose to its highest point of influence in Perthshire and
Forfarshire, and also sank to its lowest ebb, under powers and
circumstances which the haughty chief was too proud to submit
to and, in his old age, unable to successfully resist. History
and tradition alike bear testimony to the remarkable character
of this highland chief. His sagacity and indomitable spirit
were not more conspicuous among his contemporaries than his
extraordinary bodily strength”.
Of McComie Mor’s seven sons, John and Robert
were killed in 1673 as mentioned above. Of James and Thomas
little is known except that they inherited lands, no doubt
from their mother’s family, near Couper-Angus. No evidence of
any of their descendants has been found. Information on
Alexander is also scant but a family of McCombies in London claims to be descended from him (see below).
McCombie Smith tells us that the sixth son Angus, adopting the
more saxon form of the name MacThomas, moved south to
Fifeshire and that Donal(d), the seventh and youngest went
north to Aberdeenshire soon after the death of his father in
1676. No reference has been found in any contemporary document
to the existence of Donal as a son of McComie Mor and no
evidence is proffered to confirm that this is the same Donal
McComie who appears in the List of Pollable Persons for
Aberdeenshire in 1696 as tenant of a farm in Tough, but family
tradition which is accepted within the revived clan MacThomas
Society has held this to be so. Donal(d) died in 1714, his
gravestone being the oldest in the Tough
cemetery.
As far as is known Donald had only one surviving
son, Robert (c1687-1737). Although there were other McComies
in nearby parishes who may have been brothers of Robert, none
of their descendants remains today. Robert, after his marriage
to Isobel Ritchie became tenant of two large farms. He had
five sons about whom McCombie Smith tells us little except for
the eldest, William (1720 –1808) of Farmton and Lynturk. The
third son, Robert, escaped from the debacle at Culloden and
left for the West Indies but no record has been found
of what became of him there. The fifth son Alexander of
Waulkmill, near Alford, married a Janet Gordon and had two
sons, one of whom died young and the other remained single
without issue. As for William, apparently a man of great
strength and popularity, rather like his great grandfather
McComie Mor, he had seven sons who were by now known as
McCombie, the family name having changed around
1730/40.
Four
of these sons produced what became for most of the 19th
century the best known family of Aberdeenshire McCombies. One
of William’s grandsons was William of Tillyfour (1805-1880), a
Member of Parliament and renowned breeder of Aberdeen Angus
cattle, one-time president of the Scottish Chamber of
Agriculture and author of the successful publication “Cattle
and Cattle Breeders”.
On one occasion, he famously entertained Queen
Victoria to tea at Tillyfour and just before
he died his cattle won the two main prizes at the 1878 Paris
Exhibition “against all the most famous breeds of cattle from
every country of Europe”. Other grandsons included
William of Easterskene and Lynturk (1802 -1890), who became a
large land-owner and very successful farmer and was the first
to attempt to document the family history up to that moment;
James Boyn McCombie (1808 - 1885) who was an advocate in
Aberdeen, and Thomas (1819 –1869) a Member of the Legislative
Assembly of Victoria, Australia. Up to the early part of the
twentieth century the family comprised not only a number of
farmers who had begun as tenants and became owners of their
farms, but also many in the professions – magistrates,
clergymen, solicitors, physicians – most of whom were
graduates of Aberdeen University. Alas, very few descendants
of these McCombies, and still named McCombie, survive in
Aberdeenshire today and only one is in farming – he being the
fourth successive Charles after Charles McCombie of
Tillychetly (Alford), a grandson of William of Lynturk. There
is, however, a great-great-great grandson of William’s second
son Robert and
third son William still farming in Queensland, Australia. The
descent is from both brothers as the son of one married the
daughter of the other.
William’s fourth son John, born in 1760, and
married to Jane Barnett, was for a time tidesman (customs
officer) in Aberdeen before taking his family
to London where his eldest son, William
(1785- 1861) had nine children of whom four were sons. The
first son, John, went to Holland where he
married and thence to France where
at least two of his children were born, while the second son,
also William, an engineer, emigrated to Australia around 1840; a number of his descendants
were there in the 1920s but have since been “lost” to this
researcher. Another son Alexander Barnett, born in Greenwich in 1833, went to the California in the 1860s where there are several descendants
today but very few of them named McCombie. Finally, the many
descendants of this line still in the south of England are the descendants of the fourth and
youngest son of William, James-Ross (1836-1881) a lamplighter
in Lambeth, and his two sons James-Ross (II) and
Charles-Henry.
Perhaps, we should dwell in a little more detail
on the eventful life and progeny of Alexander, second son of
John the Tidesman. Alexander was born in 1788 and married
Jessie Robertson in London in 1816. It
appears that he went to Grenada in
the West Indies where, described as a merchant, he purchased a
property in 1819.
By 1826 Alexander had become editor and publisher of the
Grenada Free press and Weekly Gazette. Later, although he
retained property in Grenada, he
spent much of his time in Castries on the
island of St Lucia where he
was responsible for the installation in 1848 of the
fresh-water distribution system in the town: and in 1851 he
was manager of the Colonial Bank, became a town councillor and
then mayor of Castries in 1854. His son John
Ross succeeded him as editor of the Free Press and daughter
Jessie ran a school in the town of St
Georges. Following the death of his wife only a few years
after his arrival in Grenada – and
also of his brother Thomas who had joined him there –
Alexander had long term relationships with two “free black or
mixed-race” women by whom he had several more children. The
youngest, Joseph Cambridge McCombie became editor and
proprietor of the weekly St Lucia Observer in the 1870s and
1880s. (In 1876 it was reported that he was editing his paper
from the Royal Gaol of Castries where he was serving a
six-month sentence for contempt of Court, having refused to
divulge the name of the author of an controversial article in
the paper). Another son, Alexander junior, born in 1826 was a
“Commission merchant and Licensed Auctioneer” and later
described as a (sugar?) planter in St Lucia. He married Helena (or Elenor) Cooke from Ireland
with whom he had at least four children the first,
Thomas-Gerald, being born at sea somewhere in the Atlantic and
who later became a well-known sea captain. Alexander jnr died
soon after his father in the early 1860s while his children
were still very young. They were taken to Ireland to be
brought up and educated by Helena’s family giving rise to
quite a colony of McCombies in County Dublin towards the end
of the 19th century, most of them descendants of Thomas-Gerald
(1852- 1934). In the early 1900s many of them moved to British Columbia where there are presently several
descendants – although only one is named McCombie. Alexander’s
second son must have remained in or returned to
St Lucia as there are there today
several of his descendants named McCombie; interestingly the
mothers, married or not, continued to give their children the
McCombie name.
On the subject of the West Indies, it
is intriguing that a family of McComies, “originating” in
Grenada, has lived in
Trinidad and Tobago since the late
1800s. The relationship, if any, between these families has
not been established.
To return to the title of this chapter, it is
tentatively concluded that there are no more than a few dozen
McCombies alive today who are directly descended (albeit on
the basis of family tradition) from John McComie Mor, seventh
chief, of the clan MacThomas. Some are in Aberdeenshire and
Australia, others in West
Indies and Canada as mentioned
above, but most are in or near Greater London. (This excludes
“The McCombies of Dalkilry” whose claim to such descent is
discussed below).
Logie-Coldstone
At the same time as Donal (1649-1714), the
putative seventh son of John M’Comie of Forter, makes his
appearance in Tough, Aberdeenshire (List of pollable persons
within the shire of Aberdeen, 1696), no less than five
McComie families were listed as living less than 20 miles away
as tenants and subtenants of three large farms in
Logie-Coldstone. According to John G. Michie’s History of Logie-
Coldstone and the Braes of Mar (1896), it was the general
belief that these McComies also had come from Glenisla, but,
as Michie himself noted, in 1696 they were in “good
circumstances” and appeared to be too well established to have
moved north in the latter half of the century. Indeed, as
explained below, it is clear that they must have done so at
least one hundred years earlier, long before the Covenanter
wars and the death of the clan chief.
At the time of the witch trials in Scotland at
the end of the sixteenth century, the record of a Session of
the Kirk of Logie-in-Mar held on the 10th and 17th of April
1597 to consider a case of alleged sorcery in the Parish,
mentions George Makcomye in Nether Ruthven as one of the Kirk
elders, as well as John and Alexander Makomeis, also from
Nether Ruthven, as participants in the same Kirk Session. They
must have been there for several years to have gained the
status of elders. Some fifty years later, according to the
records of a Compensation Court in neighbouring Tarland, John
McComy and George McComy, both of Ruthven,
were compensated for animals and food “plundered and takin”
from them by Covenanter armies in 1647. It was these very same
farms that were still occupied by three of the McComie
families in 1696 and from where a Joseph McOmie first came to
light in 1748. Joseph is the earliest ancestor from
Logie-Coldstone to which present day McCombies can be traced
with certainty. Unfortunately, a hiatus in the OPRs between
1720 and 1748 prevents us from identifying precisely which of
the five McComies present in 1696 was his father and/or
grandfather. We might note in passing that the
Logie-Coldstone OPRs for September1716 and June 1719 record
the births of children to each of Alister, James and Donal
MackHomie (as the clerk of the moment spelled the name), all
in Ruthven. It is therefore quite possible, even likely, that
Donald in Tough, a few miles along the road, was one of this
long established group rather than having moved independently
from Glenisla in the latter half on the 17th
century.
Joseph McOmie seems to have been something of a
ladies’ man, or worse, as he appears several times in the
records of the Kirk Sessions between 1748 and 1754 as being
accused and/or guilty of “fornication” or of “ravishing” one
or other of the local young women. He finally married Isobel
Gray in 1756 by which time he was calling himself McCombie.
Until 1750 or so, Joseph and the other contemporary members of
the clan in Logie-Coldstone were referred to as MackHomie,
McComie or McOmie but by the 1770s all had become McCombie.
This was one of the first groups outside the city of Aberdeen to insert the “b”. There were in fact
three other families of the same name in Logie-Coldstone, all
with children born in the 1750s and 1760s. It must have been
one of the most common names in the Parish which comprised no
more than 1,200 souls, mostly impoverished tenant farmers,
although the McComies seem to have been rather better off than
most. As far as can be determined, no McCombie descendant of
these other families survives today. Possible exceptions are
the descendants of Robert, the eldest son of John McComie who
was in the same farm at the same time as Joseph, and who
probably was the same Robert who married Isobel Angus in
Cabrach in 1780. (see below).
Joseph and Isobel had at least seven children
between 1757 and 1775 of which there were four sons. Of the
eldest, John, born in 1757, nothing is known. The descendants
of the second and third sons, Peter and Charles, comprise by
far the greatest number of the McCombies – more than three
quarters of the total - remaining in Aberdeen(shire). Joseph died in Tarland in 1798 having spent
most of his life as a farmer but also having gained some fame
as an auctioneer at local “roups”.
As a further sign of his respectability, his
fourth son William (1771-1849) married Marjory McCombie
daughter of the much wealthier William of Lynturk, grandson of
Donald of Tough. They had one son, also called William
(1809-1870), who became not only a farmer and cattle breeder
at Cairnballoch near Alford, but also a distinguished author
and the first editor of the Aberdeen Free Press
(predecessor of the
Press & Journal, the current local daily newspaper
covering Aberdeen and the North East of Scotland). According
to one historian, William McCombie was “a model Aberdeenshire
self-educated man. A walking liberal education, he was a small
farmer, a fervent Baptist, [and] a rabid liberal.” One of his
five sons, Henry, a farmer near Kemnay, was President of the
Aberdeenshire Radical Association and extremely active in the
movement to obtain security of tenure for tenant farmers. He
was the only son with any children, as was only one of Henry’s
four sons and he in turn is survived by only two
great-grandsons now in the south of
England.
North East
Aberdeenshire
Joseph’s second son Peter, a corn dealer, born
in 1761, moved to Lonmay in the north east of the county about
1780; many of his descendants, from two marriages, are still
in that area. The majority, descended from Alexander, the
eldest of four sons by his first marriage to Elspeth Husband,
were, although of course no longer are, crofters and farm
servants, while some were involved in the fishing industry,
all in the north east of Aberdeenshire. Alexander’s son
William had ten children, the youngest of which, Isabella born
in 1858, had two illegitimate sons who retained their mother’s
name giving rise to eight male McCombie grandchildren and at
least sixteen great grandchildren. A large group of Peter’s
descendants is now in the county of
Angus, some are scattered thinly in
England and two separate families
are in Western Australia. No surviving
offspring of the other three brothers has been
identified.
Peter had three more sons by his second marriage
to Jean Milne. There is a strong possibility, that the eldest
– John, born in 1795 - was the same John McCombie from
Aberdeen who arrived in Nova Scotia in 1812
or 1813 seven years before he applied for a land grant in
1820, and from whom sprung an extensive family of a roughly
estimated one hundred McCombies now spread widely in the USA.
John married a Margaret Richards (or Ritchie) and had two
sons, Joseph (1819-1911) and William John (1820-1904). While
not much is presently known of Joseph’s descendants after
1900, the second son married Sarah Whidden and had eight
children, of which three were sons, all born in Nova Scotia. The descendants of the eldest, John
(1844- 1921) moved to Massachusetts,
USA where his grandchildren changed the
spelling of the name to MacCombie, while those of the other
two sons Daniel (1851-1931) and William (1856-1938)
established themselves in Michigan.
To return to Peter: his second son, Charles
(1804-1883), a master cooper, moved for a while to London where his only son Charles was a pharmacist
at the turn of the 19th/20th century. Charles the younger had
five sons, one of whom lived and worked (and married) in Peru;
another was a doctor in India and two went to New Zealand
where a few of their progeny still live. A daughter of Charles
(I) married another McCombie, a seaman, whose origin is
uncertain, and gave rise to a family containing three railway
engineers two of whom served in India in the early 20th
century. Part of this family is now in the Glasgow area and part in Aberdeenshire. The few descendants
of the third son, James, are still in Aberdeen city. It is estimated that up to one hundred of
Peter’s descendants named McCombie are alive today but that
could be doubled if the “Nova Scotia” branch
is included.
Donside -
Alford
One of the parishes adjoining Tough, where
Donald was farming in 1696, is that of Alford where many of
the Logie-Coldstone McCombies were living in the 19th century.
By 1841 not one was left in Logie-Coldstone – either the name
died out or the families had moved. The so-called “Alford
McCombies”, many of whom still live there along with many more
in the surrounding Parishes between the rivers Dee and Don in
south, central and west Aberdeenshire, are, as this researcher
is, descended from Joseph’s third son Charles. In the 18th and
19th centuries this branch comprised mostly tenant farmers,
farm servants, cattle dealers and the like, while in the 20th
century many went abroad to the then colonies in Asia
and Africa. Charles, born in 1769, had seven sons:
the first, Peter, by Barbara Esson (probably unmarried) and
the others by Harriet Anderson whom he married in 1805 in
Logie-Coldstone before moving to Tarland. The majority of
Peter’s McCombie descendants are still in Aberdeen(shire) but small branches are in Southern
Africa, North America, Australia and in the London area where,
between 1896 to the late1970s, the family operated an
eponymous firm of tailors with many outlets in the
city.
Of Charles’ other sons, three are not
represented by McCombies today while one has a small branch of
descendants in the North of England. The two others, John and
Robert had very large families - the latter having no less
than eleven sons of whom eight were married with children.
There are many descendants still in the Alford area,
descendants of John being butchers in the village for some 50
years, but the majority, like so many peripatetic Scots,
sought pastures new. Several families are now in England and
there are branches throughout the English speaking world, with
particularly large overseas contingents in Australia, where a
small branch now spell the name MacCombie, and Canada; as well
as in the USA where there is a branch of some thirty McCombies
in New York State descended from William, a grandson of John,
who emigrated from Aberdeen in 1909 initially to Arizona where
he was known for his horse-drawn ploughing prowess. Of the
several families that went to the former Colonies in Asia and Africa most have now returned to the
UK. The known descendants of
Charles with the McCombie name, number about 630 and some 300
more joined the family by marriage. It is estimated that
between 300 and 350 descendants are alive today. (See also the
final paragraphs of this report).
Agricultural Practices and Relative
Prosperity
Before
moving on from Aberdeenshire, we might digress a little and
ponder as to why so many McCombies that were in
Logie-Coldstone from around the mid-16th century apparently
all moved out some 250 years later in the latter part of the
18th and early 19th centuries and why some seemed to fare
better than others, although all initially remained in
farming. The explanation probably lies in the gradual but
radical changes in agricultural practices that took place in
Scotland throughout the eighteenth
century after the union of parliaments in 1707 and the opening
up of English markets to Scottish farmers. Agriculture had
been organized largely on a traditional, inefficient
open-field system known as runrig, whereby a number of
tenants, perhaps as many as ten, worked in cooperation with
the land being shared out in small strips and blocks of
differing sizes and quality. This was certainly the case in
South West Aberdeenshire, including the Logie-Coldstone
parish, during the 17th and most of the 18th centuries.
There,
as many as forty percent of the active population were tenants
in multi-tenant farms where the emphasis was on stock rearing
rather than arable farming. In 1696 three farms had McCombies
as principal tenants and two of them had four or more
subtenants, some of whom were also
McCombies.
The new
agricultural methods introduced in the 18th century, resulting
in vastly improved pasture, the growing of fodder crops and
improved tillage, were incompatible with runrig. The new style
of farming called for more compact single-tenant farms with
larger land units worked by cotters (who sublet small parts of
the land) and live-in farm servants. This practice was already
more advanced in central and north eastern parts of
Aberdeenshire where the land was more suitable for
arable-oriented farming which could not be efficient under
fragmented occupation - and it was mainly grain that paid the
rent. While the new agricultural practices were, of course,
also introduced in Logie-Coldstone, it was a little further
north and east where the climate, geology and soil were better
that they really took hold and became much more profitable.
Whereas the growing season in Logie-Coldstone was but 207
days, it increased to 222 days a few miles inland from Aberdeen and 241 days at the coast. The author of
the 1841 Statistical Account for Logie-Coldstone lamented
that, compared to 50 years earlier, the farms of the parish
“can no longer boast of superiority of appearance or
peculiarity of produce, for skilful and successful competitors
have gradually sprung up around them, and stripping them of
their honours”. It is suspected that once one or two McCombies
with sufficient resources to stock the larger units decided to
move, the others followed. In the 50 years between 1791 and
1841 the population of the parish fell from 1300 to some
900.
At that
time, the North East of Scotland was exceptional, not only in
the excellence of its farming, but also in having great
variety in the size of its farms from a “cottar’s” acre,
through crofts with a single cow and small farms requiring
two-horse labour, to cattle and grain farms of a hundred acres
and more employing six or eight horses. Unlike most other
regions, agricultural land was not monopolized by a few
farmers with huge estates; any farm servant or day labourer,
by dint of hard work and thriftiness could aspire to having
his own small holding which he could build upon, often through
supplementary income from such non-agricultural occupations as
knitting and weaving (by the women), joinery, blacksmithing,
masonry and even illicit distilling and smuggling. Gradually,
however, over a long period, the changes in management and
farming practices, not to mention the high rents exacted by
the Lairds (landowners) and big farmers, resulted in fewer and
more efficient farms and fewer, more professional, farmers. It
also meant that the principal tenants prospered (witness for
example, William of Easterskene and William of Tillyfour),
eventually owning their farms, while the cottar and farm
servant classes became stuck there with little prospect of
improving their lot and barely able to provide the most basic
of comforts for their families. This process was accelerated
by a succession of poor harvests of the 1880s which led to
widespread agitation and protest by the tenants seeking
reductions in the rents to be paid to landowners. This proved
to be ineffectual in the long term and heralded the beginning
of the end for the crofter and small-time farmer. By the
beginning of the 20th century many had been weaned away from
farming and this gradual erosion, hastened by mechanization
and automation, continued to the extent that by the late 20th
century very few of the descendants of the Logie-Coldstone
McCombies had any connection with
agriculture.
Cabrach
In the foothills of the Grampians, straddling
the Aberdeenshire/Banffshire border, lies Cabrach – a fairly
large (about 16 square miles) but sparsely populated parish
which had never more than 1000 inhabitants in the 18th and
19th centuries. There being neither town nor village, the
population was entirely rural. Most of the parish was hilly
heathland and suitable for little more than grazing which made
the buying of sheep and cattle in Spring and selling in Autumn
the major money earner. The new agricultural methods were slow
to be introduced but sufficient barley was grown in the lower
part of the parish to meet their needs as well as those of two
whisky distilleries established in the mid 1840s and producing
10,000 gallons of malt spirits
annually!
Towards the end of the eighteenth century there
was a large group of McCombies in the parish. They are likely
to have originated in Logie-Coldstone, some 20 miles away, as
their progenitor was a Robert McComie - probably the same
Robert, who was born in 1757 in Logie-Coldstone to John
McComie who was at the same farm at the same time as the
aforementioned Joseph. Robert initially married a Jean
Strachan in 1770 and had at least three sons, the third being
Adam born in 1777. By 1780 Jean had presumably died as Robert,
now pronouncing his name with a “b”, married Isobel Angus. The
“b” was there when the baptisms of his first three children
were recorded (although for the fourth and fifth children the
name had, curiously, temporarily reverted to McComie). The
other half of the family, the descendants of Jean Strachan,
did not introduce the “b” until the beginning of the19th
century.
Unusually, few of the Cabrach McCombies were
engaged in farming. James, Robert's grandson by his first
marriage married Isobel granddaughter by his second and
together they ran the parish post office and general store for
a number of years in the 1850s and 60s. Their third son
migrated to London where he became a
policeman. They took up a wide variety of trades and
occupations ranging from gardeners to grocers, masons to
ministers and included a doctor of medicine who was also an
anthropologist graduating from Marischal
College, Aberdeen in 1883. Most
moved out of the area some 150 years ago or even earlier and
spread to Moray, the coastal areas of Banffshire and
especially to Aberdeen, where there are still
a good number of descendants, with a sprinkling in Glasgow, the north of England, and Canada. None of
their progeny remains in Cabrach.
Robert
(1807-1899) and William (1812-1902), both carpenters, sons of
Adam, a stonemason, and grandsons of Robert and Jean Strachan,
are almost certainly the same two brothers who went from
Aberdeenshire to the USA where the former was naturalized in
Cambria County, Pennsylvania, in 1835. Between them, they
produced eleven sons who have now many McCombie descendants in
the north eastern states, still mostly in Pennsylvania.
Unfortunately, no
documentary evidence of how and when they arrived in the
USA has been traced; moreover the
descendants of Robert believe he was born in August 1808
rather than 1807 and that his middle name was Jacob – a name
totally unknown among McCombies of that time. There are
however enough pointers to convince this author of their
identity.
Banffshire and
Morayshire
Just across the Banffshire border is Mortlach
where we find the births of a William and Robert sons of a
John McCombie (with a “b”) as early as 1742 and 1744 but
nothing further is known of this family. A little further to
the north, in Boharm, a John McComie married Isobel Watt in
1767 and later moved to Glass in Aberdeenshire where their son
Alexander was born in 1771. Alexander went to India as
a soldier in 1792, there to give rise (illegitimately) to a
large Anglo-Indian family of McCombies. His third son was
Master of Music to the Bombay Government while the next
generation comprised several merchants in Bombay. A generation still later, two brothers graduated
from Aberdeen University,
one to become a surgeon in London and Aberdeen and another a lecturer at Cambridge University in the early
and mid 1900s. After 27 years in India, Alexander, aged 47, returned to Scotland in 1819 and married almost immediately
Agnes Watt who died some 20 years later, whereupon Alexander
married again, this time to Margaret George. He left this
world aged 80 in 1851 and is now recumbent between his two
wives in the cemetery at Keith. There is so far no trace of
present-day descendants of Alexander still named
McCombie.
Further West in Morayshire there were two
smaller branches, with the earliest references being to
gardeners in Elgin around 1800. They have
also spread far and wide with some in Edinburgh, London, Canada, Australia, and even one
last heard of in Norway in the late
1970s, as well as in Aberdeen. One of the
families in Aberdeen lost three sons in the
Great War but altogether they would account for some thirty to
forty McCombies alive today.
Inverness
In Inverness and Ross-shire there was a
substantial group of McCom(b)ies during the period from the
mid 18th to the mid 19th centuries, although there is a
reference as far back as 1654/55 to the family of an Alexander
McComie. Of the many families of millers and weavers in
Resolis on the Black Isle in the latter half of the 18th
century, one spelled the name with the “b” as early as 1754,
about the same time that the Aberdeenshire group began to
change the name. Where these McCom(b)ies came from or went to,
one can only hazard a guess but none remains in the area today
and only a handful of present-day descendants have been traced
anywhere. This is with the exception of the family of a John
McComie (c1802-1891) from Inverness. Unfortunately,
his death certificate indicated his parents to be unknown
although one could now make an educated guess as to who they
and his grandparents were. One of his grandsons, a piano
tuner, after a spell in Glasgow, established
a branch of this family in Canada
where one of his sons, Robert, in 1914, gained fame as the
first person in Canada to obtain an
air-engineer licence, with his aeroplane the first to be
registered there. Other members of the family are in
Perthshire and various parts of England. Some of John’s descendants are still in the Inverness area where the family was once well known for its
footballing prowess, one member eventually becoming a
professional in the north of England and gaining several Scottish
caps.
Perthshire and
Kinross
In A
Memoir of a McComie
family (1995), Frank McCombie now of Newcastle, in the north east of England, discusses the presence (and subsequent
disappearance) of the numerous McComies in Perthshire in the
17th and 18th centuries. For the most part, these McComies had
probably arrived there following the dispersal of the clan
from Glenisla but there is evidence of some being there as
early as the beginning of the 17th century. Frank traces with
some certainty his own family back to about 1790 in the
Tayside parish of Rhynd from where it moved to Forfarshire
(now Angus) and then to Dundee in the middle of the 19th
century. In this case, the “b” was not introduced until after
1850. While there is apparently none of this family left in
Perthshire and only a few in Dundee, there is a
branch a little further south in Fife and others in
the north of England; there is a
substantial group in Ontario, and British Columbia, Canada
and another in New Jersey, USA. Other Perthshire McComies, including, in
particular, a family of bakers, are known to have moved to
Essex around 1820 but they seem to have petered out
there or have been “lost” in the changing of the name to
McCombie.
Just across the county border in Kinross is the
parish of Orwell where we find a John McComie and his wife
Isobel Murdow (ch?) in the 1750s. They and the two succeeding
generations were in farming there but around 1840 their
grandson William, by now a McCombie, with his family of six
sons and two daughters, was drawn to the rapidly expanding
Glasgow and its shipbuilding industry. His
eldest son James and his wife Marion had one
surviving son, John, who emigrated in the 1880s to New Zealand where he
married an Irish girl and established a large branch of
McCombies, originally in Dunedin but now
spread throughout the country. Some of them have moved on to
Australia and one or two
transferred back to the UK. This is
in stark contrast to the fortunes of the other five sons of
William who had all been born in the relative tranquility of
rural Kinross but who remained to live and work in what we
would now consider the appalling conditions of the dockyards
of Clydeside. Two died at a young age but each of the others
had a large family producing altogether upwards of a dozen
McCombie sons (and about the same number of daughters) but no
more than two or three of these survived to adulthood. The
next generation fared little better with the first World War
also taking its toll. Thus while the family thrived in the
Antipodes, only one McCombie descendant of the other
five brothers has been traced - a bachelor octogenarian pastor
living in Canada.
London and the South East of
England
This account would not be complete without a
section on the “McCombies of
Dalkilry” - the name adopted by a
well-defined branch and the eponymous title of a book by one
of their number, the late Emily Fenn. The entire traceable
history of the family is in England
where its earliest positively identified forebear was a George
McCombie whose son George Samuel was baptised in 1782 in
Heston, Middlesex. In 1950, based on Mrs Fenn’s research, the
family was officially recognised by the Lord Lyon as a
distinct family within the McCombie sept and granted its coat
of arms. As recounted in the book, the family claims to be
descended from John McComie Mor’s second son Alexander (c1639
– 83). However, no evidence is given for the presumption that
the Alexander (III) who died age unknown in Heston, Middlesex,
in 1780, was the son of Alexander (II) and grandson of
Alexander son of McComie Mor. Considering that “grandson”
Alexander died more than 140 years after the birth of his
putative grandfather, and given the average lifespan and years
between generations at the time, the claim is highly
improbable unless Alexander (III) was a very old man when he
died. But that would make the second presumption – namely that
he was the grandfather of George Samuel McCombie baptised in
Heston 1782 – also unlikely. If indeed there is a direct link,
it would seem that at least one generation is missing.
Moreover, by another account, the 18th century genealogical
statement known as the Latta MS, Alexander II
was said to have drowned, unmarried, in the river Tay
near Errol in 1697.
What is certain is that the parents of George
Samuel baptised in 1782 were George and Millicent McCombie.
George was not a common name among the McCombies of that time
but, as noted above, there were George McComies among the
tenant farmers in Logie-Coldstone in 1597, 1647, 1696, and
again in the 1750s, the latter having a son Alexander born in
1756. We know that there was also an Alexander there in 1597
and an Alister (Alexander) in 1696 who had at least one son
James born in 1716. Just as in the case of Donald, the
presumed youngest son of McComie Mor, it is possible, to put
it no more strongly, that Alexander (III) and George in
Heston, were from one of the Logie-Coldstone families who
joined the general exodus in the second half of the 18th
century. However, if that were the case, George would have to
have been born before 1748 as the records after that are good
and show no sign of his birth in the 1750s. Perhaps more
interestingly, an Alexander McKomie was named as the father of
a number of children born between 1711 and 1726 in Gartly
(West Aberdeenshire) including George baptised in
1720. Nothing whatsoever is known of what became of this
family. All this is not to mention the McCom(b)ies that
existed in other counties of Scotland, including for example the many Alexanders, Samuels
and the occasional George who were in the Parish of Resolis in
the Black Isle in the 1750s and 1760s and who “disappeared”
soon thereafter.
To return to what we do know of the McCombies of
Dalkilry: for five successive generations after George Samuel,
the first-born son of the first-born son was named George
John, the practice ending with the death in infancy of George
John V. The first was a bookbinder while the second and third
were involved in what was known as the rag trade, particularly
in a tie manufacturing business in London that existed in
various forms from 1856 to 1909. Robert, the second son of
George Samuel, was a market gardener like his father; one of
his son’s Samuel apparently fought at Kandahar in 1878/9 and later became a policeman in Nottingham before the family returned to London. The next generation (which lived from approximately
1860 to 1940) were mainly businessmen while their sons were
more often in banking, government service or the church. The
generation born between the wars was one of professionals in
engineering, chemistry, banking and teaching. There are still
a score or more members of the family with the McCombie name
in the South of England and few scattered around the rest of
the country. The current chief of the clan is Clive Thomas
McCombie grandson of the first chieftain to whom arms were
granted in 1950.
Finally, quite separately from the previous
family, we find that a John McCombie, a widower and a baker,
married Martha Corker in the East End of London 1808. It has
proved to be very difficult to determine the provenance of
this John but the union resulted in a substantial colony of
McCombies in London and more recently in
Essex. Walter, a grandson of John and Martha,
emigrated to Australia in 1875 and
founded quite a large branch in New South
Wales where they are still today. There were of course other
McCombies in and around London at that time,
especially in the army at Woolwich. There was, for example, a
corporal John McCombie whose discharge papers indicate that he
was born in 1761 in the “Parish of Fairland (sic) in the
county of Aberdeen”.
Unfortunately, there was no such parish and he cannot be found
in Tarland - such things are meant to try us! His subsequent
family has been well documented but it is frustrating to be so
near yet so far from finding out where they
originated.
Miscellaneous Twigs and
Strays
This account makes reference to the larger
family groups that have been identified but there are of
course many other small groups, like that of the
aforementioned corporal John McCombie, or individual families
existing today which have either remained small in terms of
numbers of current McCombies or have not been traced back far
enough to be “attached” or fitted to any larger branch.
Examples include the family and descendants of one Charles
McCombie, a coal merchant in Aberdeen in the
late 1700s, and his wife Margaret Templeton. They had four
grandsons: one, a medical student, died at the age of 20;
another, a surgeon in the Royal Navy, died of yellow fever,
along with most of his ship’s crew, in the West Indies at the
age of 23; the third was an advocate in Edinburgh and the
fourth a solicitor’s clerk, the only one with McCombie
descendants today, numbering half a dozen or so in the South
of England.
As a further example, William McCombie, a
storekeeper in Glasgow in the 1830s, despite
having five grandsons, is now represented by only a few
McCombies split between the Glasgow area and
Fife. In these and most other cases it has not yet
been possible to trace the family back beyond the 19th century
so it not known from where they originated or whether or not
they are part of any of the larger groups described
above.
Needless
to say there are sure to be many more McCombies who have not
even been identified by this researcher far less found to fit
into the larger picture as a member of one or more of the
known branches. If we might conjecture as to what the
continuation of the study might hold, we could look more
closely at the outline of the McCombie descendants of Charles,
third son of Joseph of Logie-Coldstone, and his wife Harriet
Anderson. We are now in the 9th generation although some of
the 5th generation are still with us. There are some 780
individuals in the list, one third of whom are spouses who
became McCombies by marriage. There are thus some 520 direct
descendants of Charles with the name McCombie. (There are
another 110 descendants and 50 wives emanating from his
illegitimate son John by Helen Reid). They are of course but a
tiny fraction of all Charles’ descendants which increase
exponentially with each generation; if in each generation the
numbers of sons and daughters were about equal, and multiplied
at the same rate as the McCombie sons, we could have reached a
staggering 60,000 descendants of Charles. Each succeeding
generation covers an ever increasing range of dates which is
not surprising when one considers that Charles himself
fathered his first son at the age of 28 and his seventh 23
years later. Some of the 6th generation were born before the
turn of the 20th century while others did not appear until the
1960s.
Taking
into account the numbers of known deceased, and making
guesstimates as to how many others in each generation are
likely to be still alive, as well as to the numbers of as yet
unidentified family members, especially those born in the past
four or five years, it is estimated that between 300 and 350
McCombie descendants of Charles are alive today; that is
roughly one third of the total data base of 930 (520+110+300
wives). If this is applied across the whole of my McCombie
data base of just over 4,000 names we arrive at a figure for
all living McCombies of around 1,400. However, since
information available on some of the other branches is rather
scantier than that for Charles, the total number is likely to
be somewhat higher - 1,800 to 2,000 at the very most. This
surprisingly (to me) small number should make it quite
feasible to “identify all McCombies and establish their
relationship to each other” - the original goal of the study.
On the other hand, the goalposts keep moving with the regular
appearance of new McCombies, which means, of course, that this
and any future report will require revision as soon as it is
“finished”.
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