Ancestors Read Online Free Page A

feet—in kilts, walking up and down and making those squealing noises and my heart began to pound with excitement. Since that moment everything Scottish—kilts, plaid, bagpipe music, the accent, the coloring—produces a mysterious, unthinking pleasure in me.
    The use of last names was introduced into Scotland by the Normans in about 1100. The first people to acquire them were the nobles and the great landowners, who called themselvesafter the lands they possessed. According to George F. Black’s
The Surnames of Scotland,
the name
Maxwell
is “derived from a salmon pool on the Tweed, near Kelso Bridge, still locally known as ‘Max-wheel.’ Maccus, son of Undewyn, a Saxon lord, in the reign of David I, obtained a grant of land on the Tweed before 1150, and from the fishery attached thereto, called Maccus’s Wiel (OE.
wael,
a pool, whirlpool), the lands obtained their name.”
    Maxwell is a Lowland name, common in Dumfriesshire but not limited to it. In a book * my cousin unearthed, Henry Maxwell’s sons are said to be from Wigtonshire and Kirkcudbrightshire. Since they were born in America, what this means is that their father’s people lived in those two Lowland counties, which are side by side in the extreme southwest of Scotland. Kirkcudbrightshire is mountainous, sloping down to the rugged coast of the Solway Firth. It is cattle-raising country, dotted with ruined abbeys and castles. Wigtonshire is hilly moorland, about half of it under cultivation. It has a great many lakes, and hill forts, standing stones, Pictish crannogs, and other vestiges of pre-Roman Britain.
    Assuming that Henry Maxwell’s father was a tenant farmer, he was born in a stone shanty with a turf or a thatched roof and with straw, heather, or moss stuffed in the cracks between the stones. A stone house built without mortar could be pulled apart by a raiding party in the morning and by nightfall be intact once more. The fire was in the middle of the floor, and the smoke escaped through holes in the roof—some of the smoke. The cattle were tethered at one end of the only room and the family lay down to sleep at the other, on piles of heather. Smallpox and skin disease were prevalent throughout the countryside.
    If the Lowland farmer spoke with an uncouth accent, dressed in rags, lived in a miserable hovel, and fed on the same grain he fed his animals, it was not because he was a savage but because the relentless marauding of the English left him with very little choice. As for why he didn’t simply cut his throat, the answer is that he was a Presbyterian and did not expect much in the way of earthly happiness.
    A granddaughter of Henry Maxwell, when she was an old woman, said that he and his uncle, Walter Carson, fled from Scotland to Ireland to escape persecution. Walter Carson was a Quaker, which meant that he would not bear arms or take an oath in courts of law and elsewhere or attend the established church or pay tithes, and so he was in several kinds of trouble at once. After two years in Ireland they sailed for America, Walter Carson’s family being with them, and settled in Pennsylvania. Because of its policy of religious toleration it had become a refuge for European immigrants of persecuted sects. Walter Carson doubtless went there for that reason. And to be among people who believed, as he did, that one can receive whatever understanding and guidance in divine truth he may need from the “inward light” placed in his own heart by the Holy Spirit.
    As for Henry Maxwell, what seems most likely is that he was an orphan left in the care of his mother’s brother.
    The old woman said that if her grandfather had any brothers or sisters, she had never heard them spoken of. She also said that he was highly educated and came of a well-to-do family in Scotland, and brought money with him to this country, which he changed into “Congress money”—that is to say, money issued by the Continental Congress—soon after his arrival, thereby