The Origin of the Name McKnight

North ArgyllMcKnight is one of many variations on the name MacNaughton.  MacNaughton is the Anglicized version of mac Nechtan, which means son (or descendant of) Nechtan.  So who was Nechtan?  Why, Nechtan Morbet, known as Nechtan the Great, ancient King of the Picts, or so it is often said.  But there were three Pictish kings named Nechtan, not to mention two Dál Riata kings with sons and grandsons named Nechtan.  And then there was Nechtan of Moray, a noble who was loyal to his king, Malcolm IV, and rewarded with an estate.  In other words, it's not at all clear who Nechtan was.  In a sense, he was all of them.

The Dál Riata were the people who lived on the Scottish west coast, in what is now called Argyll.  Their roots were in Ireland, part of a larger collection of Celtic people called the Ulaid, and after whom Ulster is named.  By the fifth century AD the Dál Riata had become unified into a kingdom that included what is now north Antrim, Argyll, and many of the islands between in the Irish Sea.  The people, called Scots by the Romans, identified themselves as members of various kin groups, or cenéla, which were a broader version of the smaller clans yet to come.  Each cenél was said to descend from a particular king - whether this was actually true or not, or even whether the king actually existed, was beside the point.  The point was not to delineate a factual genealogy, but instead to invoke a heroic genealogy.  This was a way to honor one's ancestors (whoever they may have been) and to bring their spirit into one's present life.  One aspired to emulate the ancestor's character and deeds, as understood in the present, at whatever scale one was capable of.

The Cenél Loairn were the great kindred of northern Argyll.  They claimed descent from the mythical second king of Dál Riata, Loarn mac Eirc.  This cenél was further divided into cenéla descending from Loarn's sons and grandsons.  The ancestors of those who came to call themselves mac Nachten were of one of these cenéla, the Cenél Báetáin, a branch of the Cenél Muiredaig.

The Picts were a Celtic people who preceded the arrival of the Dál Riata by a millenium or so.  The northern Picts of Scotland were established around the Great Glen of what is now Inverness, around the Moray Firth, and further north.  The southern Picts lived south and east in what is now Aberdeen, Perth, and Fife.  The northern Picts and the Cenél Loairn shared a lot of territory, sometimes peaceably and sometimes not.

It is said that Nechtan is a Pictish name, yet the name appears among the Cenél Loairn and Cenél Comgaill nobility around the end of the sixth century.  This could indicate a diplomatic bowing to the Picts, a genuine trend of intermarriage, or simply the use of a similar and apparently popular name.  But by the beginning of the seventh century, there likely was intermarriage among the nobility.  It would not be long before the more important families of both the Dál Riata and the Picts could claim a mixed heritage.  In time, there was sufficient cultural intermixing and intermarriage to diminish the ethnic difference between Pict and Dál Riata Scot, though the political differences remained.  After the Viking invasions in the ninth century, these Picto-Scots began to consider themselves Gaelic, which was their shared language, and the vast shared territory came to be called Moray.

But before then, toward the end of the seventh century, the Cenél Loairn for the first time began to dominate the kingship of Dál Riata over the Cenél nGabráin to the south.  This might have been a benefit of the cultural alliance with the northern Picts, and may have paved the way for Pictish dominance over all of Dál Riata by Óengus I in the middle of the eighth century.

The mac Nachten line apparently descends from a son of one of these Cenél Loairn kings, Domnall Dunn mac Ferchair Fota mac Feredaig (bearing in mind how uncertain these medieval genealogies are).  Descended from Domnall are a remarkable string of Nechtans - father, son, and grandson.  To tell them apart, one is called the Elder (Nechtan Mor), another the Younger (Nechtan Og) and the one between is called Nechtan Nisin, Nechtan of the Wounds.

This Nechtan Mor is definitely not the great king of the Picts, Nechtan Morbet, who lived three centuries earlier, nor Nechtan II of the Picts.  His birth was probably in the early or mid eighth century, which means that his father lived in the time of the Pictish king Nechtan mac Der-Ilei.  Perhaps Nechtan the Elder was named by his father in honor of some connection with the king, and this honor was passed down three generations.  If so, it would probably have been a political connection rather than familial.  Still, at this early point, there would be no Clan MacNaughton as we think of it, the source of a surname.  Yet I'm sure there came to be a kin group who identified themselves as the sons of these Nechtans, and perhaps, in the heroic sense, of King Nechtan himself.

In about 1160, Malcolm IV, King of Scotland, moved several families from Moray to Perth as part of an effort to tamp down rebellion in Perthshire.  Among these families was a Nechtan of Moray, who was granted land in Strathtay, apparently as thane of Loch Tay.  It is almost certainly this Nechtan who is the eponym of the subsequent Clan mac Nechtan, honored as he was with land and title.  Over time, the MacNaughtons acquired lands to the southwest, and established a stronghold in Argyll, between Lochs Awe and Fyne.

Nechtan the Elder lived three and a half centuries before the MacNaughtons of Strathtay, some ten generations back.  It's possible that Nechtan of Moray knew about his Nechtan ancestors, but I'd bet that it was later generations of MacNaughtons who celebrated their name with a heroic genealogy stretching back to antiquity, containing a half dozen Nechtans and hinting at Pictish nobility.

BC

Related websites:
Clans and Families of Ireland and Scotland
Electric Scotland
Clan Macnachtan Association
The Records of Argyll (PDF document)
Celtic Scotland
Moll's 1745 Map of Argyle

The Origin of the Name Sheppeck

Uplyme, Devon I can't say that I know the origin of this unusual name, but it would be fun and perhaps instructive to try to make an educated guess.  All of my Sheppeck ancestors came from Dorset, England, and particularly the area around Bridport, so that is a place to start.

The name has many variations, mostly spelling differences involving the vowels, and the "ck" at the end is sometimes a "ch."  The oddest variation I've found is Shakeup, which was probably a mis-hearing of the name by an official.  But the variation that I think points to an origin is Shapwick, which in England would be pronounced something like Shappick.

Shapwick is a Saxon placename meaning sheep farm.  Sheep are certainly plentiful in all of Saxony, which is the southern and western part of England, so this is potentially a common placename.  I have only found two villages ever called Shapwick, however; the more well-known one in north-central Somerset, and another in eastern Dorset.  A family from Shapwick could have called itself "de Shapwick," and this could have devolved to Sheppeck.

Some evidence would come in handy, and indeed there are historical references to de Shapwicks from both of these villages.  But the name seems not to have stuck as a surname.  There is little evidence of any clan of Shapwicks or Sheppecks around either of these villages, or anywhere else in England with one exception.  There are plenty of Shapwicks, Sheppecks, etc. in western Dorset going back to the mid 1600's, in Allington, Bridport, Beaminster, and the surrounding towns.

Could this group have moved here from one of the Shapwick villages?  It's possible, but I don't think likely.  There are no direct routes connecting either Shapwick with this part of Dorset.  Could a nearby manor or estate have been called Shapwick?  I began digging deeper into old placenames, and sure enough, I found a Shapwick estate quite nearby, just over the line in Devon.

Long ago English counties were divided into administrative units called hundreds, and each hundred was divided into ten tithings.  Shapwick Devon was once a tithing of Axminster hundred, and a part of the manor of Axminster.  Now Shapwick is just a part of the parish of Uplyme.  It lies west and a bit south of Uplyme village, about 4 miles south of Axminster town and a couple of miles northwest of Lyme Regis, in Dorset.  The estate ranged from Shapwick Hill southward to the Lyme Regis - Exeter highway.  In his history of Devon, Hoskins says that Shapwick is mentioned as early as 1167.

Finding Shapwick on old maps is fun enough, but there's even a book!  It turns out that a Cistercian monastery in Axminster called Newenham Abbey ended up owning Shapwick.  The details are laid out in a book called The History of Newenham Abbey, written in 1843 by James Davidson, and this book is available and viewable online thanks to Google's book-digitizing project.

In 1245 the manor of Axminster was given to Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire for the purpose of establishing a new abbey.  It was built about a mile southwest of Axminster town, above the Axe River, and named Newham.  Some of Shapwick was part of this gift, and within a few years the Abbey had acquired most of the remaining portions of Shapwick.

The last part, donated in 1333, was a part once held by a family named "de Shapwick."  It wasn't clear even then who this family was, so the Abbey asked for and received a brief pedigree, as follows:

Roger

Philip

Roger

William

John

Peter

Thomas

John

Peter

The last Shapwick to hold the land was John, in 1317.  His son, also John, became chaplain and prior of St John's Hospital in Bridport, Dorset, in 1357.  So there's the Bridport connection, and perhaps the ancestor of all us Sheppecks.

BC

Related websites:
Devon County History Page
The History of Newenham Abbey

Lost in Upstate New York

This is an article I wrote for Je Me Souviens, the semi-annual publication of the American French Genealogical Society.  It appeared in the Autumn of 2007 (Vol 30 No 2).  It's an account of how I searched for and located the records of my French-Canadian branch.  It's a bit technical (and long-winded), but if you research genealogical records, you may find it informative.

-  -  -

I'm not a very dedicated genealogist.  I reluctantly got started only because I couldn't match my mother's memory.  After years of asking her the same questions about our family history over and over, I finally figured out that a computer's memory is pretty good, if the software cooperates.  So I bought a genealogy program and filled it with everything my mother knew about our family.  Then I added everything my eldest aunt could remember.  Then everything my cousin had from a great-grandmother's Bible.  There was a distant cousin in New York who had my family tucked away in a corner of her own genealogy.  An unknown gentleman had sent my uncle a big handwritten record of his cemetery tramping in lower Scotland.  There was a lot of information out there, it turned out, and I was busy just recording it, let alone checking anything.

The funny part is that in any genealogy there are these gaps just begging to be filled.  I tried to ignore them, I'm still trying, but I really can't resist.  So I find myself going, again, to spend a couple of hours at the American French Genealogical Society.

When I first walked in to the Society's library, and they kindly assigned me a volunteer, I explained to him that my ancestors had come from upstate New York.  The poor man rolled his eyes – oh those records are terrible, what little there is, he explained, you'll be really lucky to make the connection to Quebec.  God bless him, he tried, and failed of course, but within minutes of opening the first index we looked at, I was staring at the first piece of genealogical information I had ever gathered by myself: a listing of the marriage of my great-great grandparents, Joseph Laramie and Delphine Grenier, at Immaculate Conception in Keeseville, NY.  So I had filled in one gap, and I was hooked.

At that very moment, I had also hit my first brick wall: the witnesses to the marriage were two Irish guys.  There were no parents listed.  So my volunteer showed me how to cross-reference the witnesses to other marriages and baptisms, teasing possible relationships out of the information.  He tried to explain dit names, and demonstrated the world of mis-spellings and mis-hearings, bad transcriptions and Latinizations and Anglicizations.  And that is how I became lost in upstate New York.

There's more, click here . . .

How I Finally Found the Parents of Joseph Laramie

I started by collecting names, lots of names.  I looked for any vital records I could find for Joseph and Delphine, and kept track of all the names that were included in those records as parents, children, godparents and witnesses.  I checked records that were on the Internet as well as at the AFGS.  I searched all the genealogy message forums online, looking for any postings that might contain vital records.

I also searched census records.  The more children of theirs I could identify, the more likely I could find Joseph and Delphine's family in the censuses.  When I did find them, I could add to or check the list of children I had, and then check their vital records.

I studied my collection of names, looking for patterns that might reveal likely siblings, or aunts and uncles, or in-laws.  There seemed to be connections between Joseph and a Xavier Laramee, a Euphrosine Laramee, a Moses Laramee, and an Emily Oprey or Oprix.

The dam burst when I found the 1860 census listing for Joseph's family.  Living with Joseph and Delphine Laramie was a Harriet Laramie.  She was listed after all the other children, and though young, she was too old to be Joseph's child.  I thought, could she be a sister?  I also remembered coming across a marriage record of Henriette Laramie and Robert Coventry.  Was Harriet also Henriette?  Henriette had a sister Celina, whose marriage record to Benjamin Belisle I had also found.

I checked the 1870 census, looking for Harriet/Henriette, and I found, right next door to Joseph and Delphine, a Ralph and Harriet Coveltry.  Could this be Robert and Henriette Coventry?  They were the right age.  And then my eye caught the names of Joseph's neighbors on the other side: Benjamin and Celinda Billings.  They, too, had ages that matched the marriage record I had for Celina and Benjamin Belisle.  Could Belisle have been Anglicized to Billings?  Could I take the leap and assume all these people were related?

I checked a message forum for Clinton County, and found evidence that the whole Belisle family had, in fact, changed their name to Billings during the 1860's.  So I allowed myself to assume that Henriette and Celina were Joseph's sisters, and that their parents, Joseph Laramie and Cecile Hebert, were also Joseph's parents. 

The genealogy message forums are worth investigating.  Some of them are very informative and lively, others are sparsely visited and not much help.  The Clinton County NY forum at Genealogy.com happens to be quite lively.  In such a situation, there are often a couple of people who seem to be experts, answering everyone's queries and commenting on everything.  I posted a query asking if anyone knew about my possible Laramie family: parents Joseph and Cecile; children Joseph, Henriette, Celina, and the others who I suspected were siblings.  I mentioned that I thought the full family name was Aupry dit Laramee.  I also checked to see if anyone had been asking questions about any of these people, and I found one query, posted by someone who seemed to be pretty knowledgeable.  I emailed him directly.

Some people like to focus their genealogical research on one name.  They want to know every descendant of a particular person born long ago.  These folks, if you can identify them, can really help you fill in those gaps, because they know all the different branches of a family.  They often have really large databases, tens or hundreds of thousands of names, and these databases are often available online.  As luck would have it, the person I had emailed was just such a person, out in Missouri.  He had been researching the Aupry dit Laramee family for many years.  He confirmed my assumptions about Joseph's family, and he was quite happy that I could fill in several gaps in his research.  Of course, I was equally happy that he had been able to help me connect the dots from upstate New York to Quebec.

How I Found the Parents of Delphine Grenier

While poking around the Internet forums, I had also visited Grenier forums, of course, with no luck.  But there did seem to be a Grenier expert, too.  I was thinking of him when I tried to find my Grenier forbears the same way I had found my Laramie ancestors.  As soon as I got enough information, I would write to him.

But the Greniers proved more difficult to track down.  Not many Greniers stayed long in New York.  Many went on to Michigan through Ontario, some went to Maine, others Rhode Island.  But eventually I was able to create a list of possible relatives to Delphine Grenier, who also went by Olive.  There was a Louis, and a Matilda, a Mary, and a Cecile.  Then I found an 1850 census listing for a Greener family in Ausable, NY.  The children were named Octave, Louis, Delphine, Mary, and Matilda.  Delphine was the right age to be my Delphine.  Maybe this was my family.  Unfortunately, only one parent was alive; a father named Louis.

I was going to have to find a Louis Grenier, born and married in Quebec, who had children by these names.  It's relatively easy to track down a Quebec marriage, but a baptism is another thing.  You have to go through the records parish by parish, and there are plenty of parishes in Quebec.  That would have to be my last resort.

I wrote to the Grenier expert, but unfortunately he had no record of Greniers outside of Quebec.  I posted messages online, scoured family trees both on the Internet and at AFGS, checked censuses and vital records, but to no avail.  I was left with my last resort.

So I looked up all the marriages of men named Louis Grenier.  I had a rough idea of when he was born, so I had a rough idea of when he might have married.  I was able to compile a list of about fifteen marriages – not an impossible number.  Through further research on the Internet, I was able to eliminate about four of those marriages.  Now all I had to do was go through the microfilmed parish records looking for baptisms, looking for a matching list of children.  I would be hoping that the newly married couple would have stayed in the parish where they were married, at least initially.

It took time, but I was able to eliminate half the list before I came across the likely family, at St Michel d'Yamaska.  Louis Grenier and Dorothee Joyal had the following children: Mathilde, Louis Octave, Louis Augustin, and Olive Delphine.  There were no more records after that.  Mathilde died within the year, and the next daughter was also named Mathilde, and she also died.  So I assumed that it was likely that they might have tried naming another daughter Mathilde.  Here was the matchup, with birth years:

Parish records (Quebec)	Census record (New York)
Louis Grenier (1802)	Louis Greener (1800)
Dorothee Joyal
Louis Octave (1831)	Octave (1832)
Louis Augustin (1836)	Louis (1835)
Olive Delphine (1839)	Delphine (1838)
Mary (1841)
Matilda (1845)

I think this is a pretty good match.  But whenever I pass my genealogy data on to someone, I always warn about the two big assumptions I've made: that the Delphine who married Joseph Laramie is the same as the Delphine in the 1850 census; and that the family in the 1850 US census is the same as the family from Yamaska.

The Bombard Mystery

The very first time I posted a query at Genelogy.com, it was on the Bombard forum.  Bombard was my grandmother's maiden name, and it seemed like a good place to start.  I immediately received a reply from a man in Montreal: I have all your Bombard ancestors, would you like the list?  On my first shot, I had found one of those family experts, and he was able to fill me in.  I didn't know at the time how extensive and well-researched the French-Canadian records are, so I was shocked to find the Bombard line documented back to 17th century Flanders.  Was genealogy always going to be this easy?  No, as I quickly discovered.  But this first victory had me eager for more.

The Bombards descended from the Bombardier dit LaBombarde line which began in Quebec in 1701 with the arrival of André in the French Army.  My 2nd great-grandfather Charles was the first in his branch to head south to the United States, in about 1837.  He lived in Alburgh, Vermont with a couple of uncles, and eventually moved to Keeseville, NY.  He had married Domitille Chenet (Matilda Cheney), and they had several children, one of them my great-grandmother Edwige Mary.

My family expert from Montreal had provided a list of the children of Charles and Matilda, but it seemed incomplete.  Many birthdates were vague ("before 1844," for instance).  But I kept coming across the same list in various family trees and forum postings on the Internet.  The list seemed to be accepted by everyone, but no one knew where it had come from.  I discovered that a cousin of mine had been in touch with a different Bombard expert, down in South Carolina.  That expert had the same list, too, and she didn't know where it had come from either.

Well, I had bigger fish to fry, namely the Laramies and Greniers, but as I researched the Clinton County NY records, I kept coming across the Bombard name.  There certainly were a lot of Bombards and LaBombardes in upstate NY, and I would have been a fool not to collect the records as I came across them, even if I thought I might not use them.  The more records I collected, the more I came to doubt that well-circulated list of the children of Charles and Matilda.

Unfortunately, the records I had collected were not entirely consistent.  Here's one example: Charles and Matilda had a child named Joseph who was baptized in Keeseville in 1858.  In the 1860 census he appears to be named Treffle, and a different son is named Joseph.  In 1861 he is listed as Theophile.  A death record in 1865 lists a Treffle, apparently but not definitively the same person.  And there is a gravestone inscription for a Timothy, 1859-1867, presumably the same person.

The biggest part of the puzzle involved a Charles Jr, who was either the eldest son, living in Clinton County until his death, or a different son who fought in the Civil War and stayed south in Louisiana.

The Bombard expert in South Carolina felt she had good evidence to support the latter notion; namely, the oral testimony of the elderly great-granddaughter of the Southern Bombard.  This presumed Charles Jr had named his son, her grandfather, Charles, after all.  Indeed, I had records to indicate that the Louisiana Bombard did have three children, including a Charles, who was his eldest son.

On the other hand, my research in the New York records kept indicating that Charles Jr had never left New York.  He had married Anastasie Diguette, and by 1860 was living in Saranac, and had children.  He apparently did not serve in the Civil War, and he died in 1871, at the age of 36.  In this case, the records were consistent.

I posted a letter about the children of Charles and Matilda to all the applicable genealogy forums online.  I detailed the discrepancies between the "accepted" list and my slowly-evolving revision.  I also emailed the two family experts, in Montreal and South Carolina.  The only response I got was from the South Carolina expert – she was intrigued, but wanted to stick to the story she had personally received from Louisiana.  She did have one puzzle, though, to work out, and maybe I could help her.  She had obtained the Civil War records of the Louisiana Bombard, and was having trouble making sense of them.  The difficulty was this; the Louisiana Bombard was named Thomas in the records, not Charles.

Thomas!  He was in the accepted list of Bombard children, and I had come across Civil War records for him that seemed to link him to other Bombard children.  So he was the Louisiana Bombard! But why did his great-granddaughter think he was named Charles?

At the same time as this discovery, I came across another.  It was customary in some parishes in Quebec to take a regular census of the parish.  Though it rarely happened in the United States, it did happen, and St Peter's parish in Plattsburgh NY took censuses in 1859, 1860, and 1861.  The censuses included a mission in the village of Dannemora, in Saranac.  My Bombards were not from the area, so I had not bothered to check these records, which were at AFGS.  But, I thought, since Charles Jr and his sister had lived somewhere in Saranac, at least for a while, maybe there would be something for me in this collection.  It wasn't indexed, I'd have to go through it name by name and year by year, but oh well, why not.

Sure enough, I found my Bombards.  The entire family, in fact.  Charles Sr had died in 1860, leaving behind a pregnant Matilda with 8 children.  So Matilda had packed up the whole family and moved north to Dannemora to live with Charles Jr and his family.  She had stayed just long enough to give birth, and had then gone back to Keeseville.  And she had stayed just long enough to be recorded in the 1861 parish census.

So now I finally had all the children, including Thomas, who was baptized Joseph.  The only thread still loose was why the Louisiana Bombards thought their forbear was named Charles, and for that thread I only have a theory.  Charles Jr, the eldest son of Charles and Matilda, died young in 1871.  Thomas, down in Louisiana, had his first son in 1872.  I think Thomas named his son in honor of his recently departed brother.  Thomas himself died young, in 1879 at age 37.  All of his children died young, too: at ages 14, 15, and 36.  So Thomas' great-granddaughter never knew him.  And her own grandfather Charles, named for his uncle, died when she was 8.  I'm sure it was easy to remember that Charles had been named for someone, but also easy to confuse whether he was named for his father or for his uncle.

By the way, the story about Thomas is that he was captured by a farmer during the Civil War, and held in a barn, and that he fell in love with the farmer's daughter.  Or he was arrested in town and held in jail, and fell in love with the jailer's daughter.  Thomas did fight in the 2nd Regiment of the NY Veteran Cavalry, which saw service in the deep South.  There is no record that he was ever captured, but the regiment was encamped in Talledega, Alabama at the end of the war.  Thomas married his Southern belle in Talledega just before the regiment was disbanded.  My guess is that Thomas was sowing wild oats in town before decamping, and found himself getting married at the end of a shotgun barrel.  It's just my theory.

BC
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