My Mother’s Side and the Family Tree

16 July, 2022 0 Comments

You look at me expectantly as you signal for me to start. I remove the lid and reach into the box. I take out a large portrait of the beautiful Morag Campbell, my grandmother on my mother’s side¹⁵. She was born on the Isle of Eigg in the Western Isles of Scotland, to Ruairidh Ruadh and Morag (m. s. McKinnon). She had nine brothers and sisters. Five of these children died when young. At the latter part of this post, you’ll be able to see a visual for the Family Tree that can help you keep track of this better.

I take out another photo of a gallant looking gentleman with a fine military moustache and grey eyes like his daughter Rhoda, my mother.

This is Hector MacGillivray, the man who married my grandmother, Morag. They went to live at 81 Plantation Street, Govan, Glasgow. Morag had five children, of which one is my mother, Rhoda Campbell MacGillivray.

The framed photos of Hector and Morag, shown here, my mother’s parents, always used to hang on her bedroom wall.

Roderick the Red

I take out another photo. It’s a photo of my great grandfather, Ruairidh Ruadh Campbell. Ruairidh had a colourful personality. The photo shows him well into his sixties.

He was said to have Viking ancestors as his height towered well over 6 feet, and he had a great mass of red hair and a large beard¹⁶. In fact, his Gaelic name Ruairidh Ruadh translates into ‘Roderick the Red’. What I can tell you for sure is that because of him, when I was young, I felt proud of the red tints in my otherwise blue-black hair¹⁷.

Roderick lived at Glamisdale on Eigg during the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was the Ferryman on the Isle of Eigg for many years; the photo shows him wearing his Ferryman uniform.

The Ferryman was an important position on the island. He lived to the ripe old age of eighty-one, dying in 1921, the same year my mother Rhoda was born; hence, she got her name from him, as Rhoda is the feminine form of Roderick.

Ogha Ruairidh Ruadh

Whenever my mother visited the Isle of Eigg as a young girl on her 6-week summer visits, the locals would call her ‘Ogha Ruairidh Ruadh’, which is Gaelic for Roderick the Red’s granddaughter.

Interestingly, Kathleen, a ‘second cousin’ of mine living on the Isle of Eigg, informed me that our family may have been descended from Irish gypsies, the ‘Black’ MacKinnons, who were exiled from Ireland, accused of murder. This may account for my grandmother’s jet black frizzy hair. But this is one story that hasn’t been corroborated.

The MacKinnons seem to have originated from the Isle of Muck, the neighbouring island to Eigg. This is also corroborated by my mother’s oral account – that they came from Muck.

Family Tree

Perhaps to give a bit of visuals on these names, here is a family tree that my cousin, Iain MacGillivray, sent me.

¹⁵ I have written a semi-fictional story about Morag’s mother, my great grandmother also called Morag, and her husband Ruaridh, The Tale of Morag, which will be published in 2022.

¹⁶ Conversation with my mother July, 2006.

¹⁷ Red hair crops up now and then in Roderick Campbell’s offspring: his granddaughter Flora Ralston (nee MacGillivray); and great grandson, Alexander Whitecross Harkness both have red hair.

Category: Chapter 1