There are two photos of my father which
I treasure simply because they are the only ones I have of him as a
young man. In the first one he´s 16 and in the second one, which
isn´t dated, I think he´s probably about 18. I know that both were
taken in Ireland where he sometimes spent the summer with relatives
who had a farm there. Judging by the Border Collie in that photo I
can only assume that they were sheep farmers though I can´t be sure
about that. There are a lot of things about my father that are a
mystery to me. In the first photo he´s carrying a camera and yet
none of the photos he took have survived. Also, there isn´t a single
photo of him as a baby. However, the greatest mystery has always been
his mother, Helen Campbell, for whom I was named. My father himself
knew only that she died very young and that on her deathbed she
pleaded with her mother-in-law to look after her child and made her
promise not give him up to her own mother. I find this horrifying as
it would appear that my paternal great grandmother, must have been
unpleasant to say the very least if her own daughter couldn´t
entrust her child to her. Until very recently these were the only
facts I knew about Helen Campbell until Linda, a cousin of our mutual
cousin, Neville, did some research into my father´s antecedents. I
now know that poor Helen was only 23 when she died and my father only
4 which explains why he had no recollection of her. Linda has traced
Helen´s family tree back to my great great grandparents who came
from Reay in Caithness. I wish my late father had known this because
sometime during the 1960s he went north to work at the nuclear power
station in Dounreay near the town of Thurso and only returned when he
found it impossible to find a suitable house there for the family.
As the name Dounreay suggests, it´s
very close to where his maternal great grandparents, Robert Campbell
and Betsey Isabella MacDonald came from. Of course, considering how
small a country Scotland is, this is no great coincidence but if he
had known this he may have been able to find relatives still living
there. However, one thing I find
particularly interesting about Robert and Betsey is that they,
perhaps unwittingly, joined two warring clans together. Throughout
Scotland´s turbulent history the Highlanders didn´t just wage war
on the English but also on each other and the clans MacDonald and
Campbell have a particularly bloody history. I won´t go into that in
detail but I have to say that I find it comforting that now that I
can lay claim to both clans in my family tree I no longer have to
defend my middle name to any of my countrymen named MacDonald! Yes,
clan memories die hard in Scotland and the massacre of MacDonalds at
Glencoe in 1692 has - unfairly - gone down in history as proof of the bloodthirsty
nature of the clan Campbell. I say "unfairly" because, according to what I´ve read about this ancient family feud, the MacDonalds weren´t averse to slaughtering the Campbells either!
With
all this recent knowledge I created this page in memory of my dear
dad who passed away in 1995.
The
tartan on the left is the clan Campbell, on the right the clan
MacDonald and in the middle the clan Armstrong to which our family
belongs. Thank you, Linda, for making this possible.
