Campbells of Early Virginia
© Cecilia L. Fabos-Becker December 29, 2015
Updated April 28, 2022
Monograph
CAMPBELLS of VIRGINIA: THE CAMPBELLS OF AUCHINBRECK, LAIRDS and BARONETS and Cadet Houses of Kilmory and Danna; CAMPBELLS OF LOUDON and Cadet House of SKELDON and otherwise.
SHEER CONFUSION IN VIRGINIA (From Ayrshire, Argyllshire and Ireland to Pennsylvania and Virginia) (1st and 2nd lines of baronets and lairds, extended family, Irish puzzles, etc.)
Table of Contents
Disclaimer–Read This Before Going Further 2
Origins of many of the Virginia Campbells 3
The Rise and Fall of the Estates of Auchinbreck 10
Problem Issues in Identifying Members of the Main Line of Auchinbreck 14
Who Really was the Second Wife of the 5th Baronet 15
Campbells of Sunderlin/Sunderland 19
The Two Gilbert Campbells in Virginia: Auchinbreck and Cawdor 23
Numbers and Names of Adult Male Campbells in Virginia by 1755 37
Campbells and the Borden Grant of the Shenandoah Valley and Piedmont, Virginia 39
Origins of Campbells of Auchinbreck: From Lairds to Baronets 45
Lairds to Baronets of Auchinbreck 48
The Baronets of Auchinbreck to 1802: 49
Irish Origins of John Campbell of Augusta County VA and His Near Relatives 55
The Patrick Campbell Line of County Donegal 57
The Baronets of Auchinbreck to 1802, continued: 58
Campbells of Skeldon, Scotland, Ireland,Pennsylvania, Virginia (17th and 18th Centuries) 64
Other Early Virginia Campbells: Northern Shenandoah Valley, Chesapeake Bay and Coast Area, South Central Virginia 75
From Monday, April 25th, through Friday, April 28th, 2022, this document was actively undergoing an extensive revision. I added my information on several groups of Campbells of this same era who lived in the Northern Shenandoah Valley and Chesapeake Bay and South Central areas of Virginia.
There very well may be more updates, and this history WILL REMAIN a work in progress and subject to revision as more and better documented information becomes slowly available. This is the sixth time I have revised in the last ten years. Each revision was based on the best sources available to me at the time of each revision. I do NOT claim that it is 100% accurate YET.
I’m as frustrated as any other researcher of this complicated clan that more primary source documents aren’t already available outside of Scotland and Ireland and on-line. Research is complex and messy and records are far from systematically organized in a consistent manner and many are not easily available. Without access to all the documents that actually DO exist, somewhere, there are holes in the families, names of members are missing, relationships and more and can only be guessed at with what does exist and is available, and contextual history of several types: economic, political and social for given geographic areas.
I started this project to find out where my mother and I came from, I ended up finding out where my nation came from and why. More than once I had the hairs along the nape of my neck stand on end when I realized I was seeing situations that led to the deepest feelings of our nation’s Declaration of Independence, the war of Revolution, but most importantly the very spirit and language of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Why do we have the importance of well-regulated militias and the right to bear arms? Why do we separate church and state and tolerate all religions and set none above the rest? Why do we have two houses of Congress, and an executive who is not annointed for life, or is the oldest son of an oldest son? Why does the Constitution of the United States provide for one man, one vote and equal sized districts in the US House of Representatives, and why, was this issue so important in our American Revolution, when for 175 years the American colonists had no representation in the English or Union Parliament?
More than most other families in Virginia, the Campbells, all several lines of them, at this point, and two others with whom they often intermarried, just as it left the old world, helped make our new nation and world. We have been often considered a disgrace or an embarrassment to the old world and our own distant cousins, particularly in the United Kingdom. Yet, we have become allies in the 20th century and into the 21st and it is more than language and “common law” that binds us. We also share blood and experiences, even though at times we’ve made different choices, or been in conflict with one another. We are, at the end of nearly three centuries and an ocean of separation, more alike, than different. The hard choices we made here, we first learned to make in Scotland from hard experiences in Scotland and Ireland. Now it is time we learn from each other and respect our pasts and use them to build a better tomorrow as people and as nations.
As a result of what I’ve seen, past the mere names and dates and types of events, this monograph is a history of a crucial period of time of not just a family but of the nations of which they were such an integral part. I decided not to stop at who, what, where and when, but also add how and why, because our ancestors did indeed have reasons to do what they did. I believe they’d like us to understand them and learn from their triumphs and losses, build a better future in our nation, and a better world with our kinsman across the sea.
There are several lines of Campbells in Virginia. A large number descend from a few main “houses” of Campbells from Scotland, but mostly from the prolific cadet houses that were branches of each main house. The branches themselves had numerous twigs.. If you believe you are descended from some great noble with a still existing large fairy tale castle, this monograph is most likely going to disappoint you. On the other hand, if you like hair-raising adventure, or 20-20 hindsight warfare strategy, you’ll find it here. Human nature not having changed much in these two and three hundred or so years ago, you’ll also find that these historic Parliaments bear a striking resemblance to modern parliaments and Congresses now.
A large group of Campbells were concentrated in Augusta County, Virginia, beginning in the very early 1740’s, and they were not the only Campbells in the Shenandoah Valley. At the same time there were a few more further north in the Shenandoah, and some of these have long been believed to be connected with the large families of the two persons who, themselves, and their children, identified as brothers, John Campbell, born in 1674 and James born in either 1682 or 1689, in Donegal, Ireland. This line was one of a few believed to be connected to a cadet house of Campbells of Auchinbreck as it was somewhat near lands that had been documented to be owned by a line of Campbells of Kilmory, particularly a minister, Patrick Campbell of Letterkenny, who had 18 sons. Unfortunately only his youngest son, John Campbell of Kildaloig had sons and he was in Argyllshire, when his only two older brothers who married had passed and it has not been firmly determined that any of John’s sons or grandsons took up lands in Donegal afterward. The names of the children of John, born in 1674, including his oldest, Patrick, connect them to the barony of Kilmecrenan in Donegal but not to Letterkenny or Drumaboden, where descendants have thought but Clandevadock, where all the names are found together by the mid 1660’s.
It is a good possibility that John, James and Mary were out of the Kildaloig cadet line to Kilmory, but there are two problems. The genealogy relies on genealogies in the largely undocumented Burke’s Peerage or the ones done in the 1700’s where the two genealogists did not examine all the records of the family and could not agree, leaving a “mess” as MacPhaill, editor of the Highland Papers described it. The official genealogy of the current baronet of Auchinbreck, who lives in New Zealand and is out of the Kilmory-Kildaloig line himself doesn’t mention the youngest siblings of his direct ancestor. The line begins with Donald Campbell, 1st laird of Kilmory (actually second since the title was used once before, but first of the second line of lairds) who has a record for him of July 11, 1593 indicating he was a grown man that year. year. He was the third son of the third laird of Kilmichael and Auchinbreck. This Donald Campbell was succeeded by his second son, Archibald, who was “served heir to his father 12th July, 1631, indicating his father died in July, 1631. Archibald, 2nd of Kilmory was succeeded by his third son, Patrick who became 3rd laird of Kilmory date not given. Patrick was succeeded by his son Donald of Kilmory, as 4th laird (or 5th going with the use of the title rather than the direct descent line). This Donald died without heirs and the title then passed to his cousin Dugald, who was a descendant of the fifth son, of the first/second laird, Donald, named Patrick Campbell of Stuck. Dugald Campbell, oldest great-grandson of Patrick Campbell of Stuck became 5th/6th of Kilmory. Dugald’s grandfather, another Dugald Campbell, Rev. of Knapdale, son of Patrick, had died in 1673. The good Rev. of Knapdale should have an easy to find death record as a respected community leader. Rev. Dugald Campbell’s oldest son was also a minister, Rev. Patrick Campbell of Torbhlaren who married Jean, daughter and heiress of John McIver Campbell of Pennymore. This ought to be fairly easily verified. Rev. Patrick Campbell’s son was then Dugald Campbell of Torbhlaren before he became laird of Kilmory. No dates are given in the genealogies up to this point. The evidence is that Dugald Campbell of Torbhlaren was an older man when he became laird of Kilmory as his sons were already in Jamaica when he succeeded. His oldest son was James, 7th laird of Kilmory and of Orangebay, Jamaica, and based on the marriage date of his next brother in 1734 was probably also married in the early 1730’s and born about 1710. James and his brother, Peter, both lived in Jamaica in the 1730’s.
When the Kimory lairdship passed from the line of the second son of the first/second laird to the line of the 5th son, there were still descendants of the third son of the first/second laird, named Duncan Campbell, who had become Vicar of Kilfinnan and married a MacAllister of Loup (no first name given, nor marriage date; church records of Killfinan might indicate something and perhaps a marriage record that identifies him as Rev Duncan Campbell marrying a ____ MacAllister might be found in “Scotland's People” the online archives of the National Archives of Scotland.) Duncan Campbell was stated to have had “Dugald Campbell of Letterkenny” and others. Dugald Campbell of Letterkenny married Annabel Hamilton of Torrence/Torrance and had as his oldest (oldest surviving) son,, John Campbell of Kildalloig who married in 1660, Elizabeth McNeil, daughter of Lachlan McNeil of Losset. John’s oldest son, Rev. Dugald Campbell of Southend, Argyll died 16th October, 1741 and “had succeeded to Kildalloig” indicating his father died before him. Since his father was married in 1660, he probably was born about 1635. He was “chamberlain of Kintyre” and the last record for him in this office appears to be 1706 and he is claimed to have died that year. Burke’s Peerage claims that the next brother of John Campbell of Kildalloig, was Alexander Campbell, also a minister of Letterkenny in County Donegal, who died in 1654 and left a son, Patrick. John and Alexander are then claimed to have had a younger brother to themselves named Duncan “Of Inveraray” who went to Ulster and who is claimed to have married Mary McCoy, where and when is not stated. Duncan and Mary were then stated to have as their (oldest) “son, Patrick Campbell of Moyris and Magherahubber, who had son John and other issue.” . . The source cited for all of this is Burke’s Peerage, 1934 G, Harvey Johnston’s Heraldry of the Campbells which doesn’t carry the line quite as far, also cited the largely undocumented Burke’s Peerage. It should be able to be verified, however, that Duncan existed and if he married before he moved to County Donegal, his marriage to Mary McCoy, or someone else should be in the parish registers in the national archives of Scotland and now mostly online through “Scotland’s People.” (for fees to search the indexes, and then more fees to search the records indicated by the indexes, and then fees for copies of records.) As his family included ministers, there may be additional contemporary data about the family in church records in a Presbyterian archives in Scotland, as in the early 1600’s the ministers of Letterkenny were being educated in Scotland and often assigned from Scotland as well.
Part of the problem is the timeline, and another is the naming tradition. John Campbell named his oldest son Patrick and John himself was born in 1674. A Patrick Campbell was born about 1613-15.. Which Patrick is this? Then there is what the Irish records show.
It is not proved that John’s grandfather was named Duncan, either, although in 1665 a Duncan was living in a nearby township who was similar in age to a Patrick, born about 1610 (some accounts say 1613 and a few say 1615), and not described as a minister, who is most likely the grandfather of John. All of the groups of Campbells in Donegal (three groups) who were in Donegal from the 1650’s on in records of Donegal, arrived in the 1650’s, after the Cromwellian wars when forfeited Irish lands were being redistributed. The answers to these lines are in determining what units served in this area in the late 1640’s under Cromwell, as lands were often, though not always, given to units in particular areas who had served there.
In going through the books on “officers and men who served with Cromwell” and “who received grants, a number of Campbells do appear, and some are readily identifiable from other records.
The first such group together, grouped in the records indicating the males served together, was Hugh, John, Susan and David Campbell. This group is Campbells of Skeldon in County Down. Others are not as easily placed because there are not as many records with these names before and later. John and Thomas “Cammell” served together and were granted lands together. In County Leitrim, “lands were issued to Hugh Campbell and others.” Another “group” was Arthur Cambell, John Camell and Alexander Campbell.” (spellings are as were written). Separate was another Hugh “Cample.” These books were a compilation of a number of different rolls that listed “officers and men that served under Cromwell in 1649 and some who served Charles II whom the Scots had recognized as king of Scotland upon the execution of his father, even if the English did not. Other rolls listed some of the same men as recipients of awards of forfeited lands. Thus some individuals appear more than once in the books and original registers. The names NOT found in this group were Duncan and Patrick, and the name Duncan does not occur earlier than the 1650’s either. That being said, not all the men who received grants kept them. They sold them to others instead.
Parliament had used land grants in lieu of pay for the soldiers sent with Cromwell and then took almost three years to determine who should forfeit lands in Ireland, and to whom they should be given. The ordinary enlisted men did not all have reserves to sustain themselves and could not live off the land they did not own. Most of the previous agriculture and livestock economy had been destroyed in the combination of the rebellion of 1641 and Cromwell’s brutal invasion of 1648-9. Most men of modest means were in dire straits and many began to sell their rights to grants to other enlisted men–and officers. By 1654, there were investigations into officers such as Richard Wood(s) a Quartermaster who had been in the campaign close to Dublin and had already taken properties in Dublin for himself and officers to determine whether the officers were acquiring the land grants under duress that they themselves had created for their own men. A letter signed by more than a dozen men who had served with Wood, said he had not. In most cases, it was simply that it had been too long since Parliament authorized or had the means to pay the men and took too long to award them with lands they could use and enlisted men, for the most part, were men of modest means with no reserves. Most went home to resume the lives they had before enlistment. Thus it’s possible one or another Campbell grantee sold his land to another member of his family who had the means to pay and wanted the land for his own expanding family. The clue is the grantees, however, as they would have first tried to sell to whom they already knew and trusted, and knew had money. That was exactly what was proved to have happened with Richard Wood. His men repeatedly described him as fair and even generous and that he’d cared for his men well as Quartermaster during the warfare itself.
After 1649, there are three sets of records for Donegal. In 1654 a civil survey was done, and there were exactly two Campbells in the barony of Kilmecrennan: Under Lord Chichester’s plantation (and could be tenants) were, in the parish of Clandevadock Patrick Campbell at the townland of “Magheryhubert, Bellnegagy and Moycross”; and Colin Campbell in the townlands of “Belliherimore and Belliherinbeg.” Both were stated on the rolls to be “Scotts” and Protestant., So if Patrick is out of the Kilmory-Kildalloig line, who is Colin? Also how old were either of these persons?
The only time some of the Campbells show up in Kilmecrenan barony is on the Pendar Survey of 1659, and by the 1660’s they were not there, and they were not there in 1654 on another survey. Here is what is on the 1659 survey because it is important to discussion of the largest, most concentrated group of Campbells in Virginia. County Donegal, Kill McCrenan Barony, Clandevadocke, townlands of Runducharick and Mimagh (two quarters of these townlands), John Campbell, gentleman with 8 Scots/English, and Colin Campbell with 4 Scots/English and 6 Irish (servants or tenants or both). The barony is the same as the descendants of John born in 1674 claim, but not the townlands. Also in this same county and barony on the 1659 survey in the Cranrus and Corrinbellagh townlands owning/holding “one quarter” was Robert Campbell, gentleman with 8 Scots/English. Last in the same county and barony but yet another townland, Magherihober, owning/holding one quarter was Patrick Campbell, with 5 Scots/English. The numbering included any wife and children, male and female and any servants. They were not sorted by sex, age or even relationship, although “Irish” were almost always servants and tenants. What is missing is there is NO Duncan Campbell and no Drumaboden, nor Letterkenny, as townlands, even in this survey which is the closest match, at least in county, barony and many of the names to the John Campbell line of the man born in 1674.
Then there are the 1665 hearth rolls. In County Donegal, barony of Kilmecrennan, and Clandehorky parish (not Clandevadock) were Duncan and Dugald Campbell in the townland of Rinnisligoe. In the parish of “Clandevogg” were: George Campbell and Patrick Campbell in the townland of “Maycross;” Robert Campbell in “Magherhubbert” and “Widow” Campbell (Colin’s widow) in two townlands of “Ballyherrin” (more and beg–big and little). Then there are more: in Conwal (Conwall) parish was a John Campbell and this was near Letterkenny in the townland of Breachy; and in Gartan parish was Donald Campbell at Kilmore. Who are this second John Campbell and Donald Campbell? If Duncan was connected to the family of Moyris (aka Moycross and Maycross) and Magherahubert, why is he then in a different parish in 1665 and who is the Dugald Campbell with them? How could Duncan be part of the family at Moyris and Magherahubert when he is not even in the same parish and didn’t appear until members of the Moyris and Magherahubert family had been there for over 10 years?
It can be said the Pennsylvania to Augusta County, Virginia lines of John and James Campbell and other siblings came from Donegal and did live some of the time in the Kilmecrenan barony but in townlands claimed by some, but not in townlands claimed by others , which is not that serious discrepancy. It may even be that John and his siblings, born 10 to 20 years after the 1665 hearth rolls were, later, at Drumaboden, but that’s not proved yet. It is more likely he was born at either Moyris or Magherahubet. With the confusion in dates and places for names that were associated with the Kilmory-Kildalloig Campbells, Burke’s and other’s genealogies need to be verified with a lot more contemporary documentation. These names, then combined with those in the 1652 grants would be the best clues to identifying the Scottish origins, as well as verifying what can be verified of Burke’s claimed Scottish history for this line..
As the Kilmory, Kilberry and Danna lines are not well documented and have a fair number of “nothing further is known,” estimated years of events, and “not married” or “no known children” and other vague unsubstantiated statements with a lack of dates, the aforementioned cadet house of Kilmory-Kildalloig, cadet to Auchinbreck, does remain a good possibility, but one of several, without more research.
Besides this line, which became noted for generals, statesmen and politicians, another early prominent individual whose home was initially used for religious services, baptisms, etc. was a Gilbert Campbell born ca. 1700-01, in Scotland. He was the next to be suspected to be of Auchinbreck, directly, possibly the the third son of Sir James Campbell, the 5th baronet. Gilbert’s oldest son was named James. He did not emigrate from Ireland as his children and grand-children stated he had come from Scotland. He was thought, initially, to have siblings in the area, particularly sisters, with him but those ladies were proved to be from a different Campbell line, one that had also been in Ireland. If he had any siblings that settled nearby, we’ve yet to find one. He may have had the children of one sister, Jane, who married Alisdair MacAllister, go to the Wilmington area of North Carolina in 1739 as a shipload of emigrants “families of 5 Scottish gentlemen and 90 poor families” headed by a MacAllister claimed to be related to this couple did indeed arrive and settle in the Wilmington area of North Carolina and had initially planned to go to Virginia according to some of the accounts. The ship that was arranged by the MacAlisters was “the Thistle” out of Saltcoats. Again,though “related” is vague and more research into this group of MacAlilisters would need to be done.
It has puzzled me and others why so many people wanted to be related to the Auchinbreck line. I think part of the answer is that the 5th baronet had so many children who lived to be adults and he had been both a traitor to the Uk and bankrupted his family–and also damaged the holdings of the cadet lines, to make it a reasonable idea that some of his children, and other kinsman might want to put some significant distance between themselves and him and have a more secure financial and land-holding future of their own. By the mid 18th century, though, a number of nobles in Scotland, including Campbells and prominent houses of their clans had undergone bankruptcy or near bankruptcy and it would have been an economically sound idea for younger children and other kin of several lines of Campbells to leave for a new start in a place with much more arable land and other opportunities. I think another answer has to be because the 5th baronet was also such a significant rogue, he was better known to history and his general story, and the fact he’d been married three times and had at least 12 children who lived to be adults, was easier to find than that of some others. However, researchers need to look longer and harder at the other lines of Campbells and find more history about them, because, so far, almost no Campbells in Virginia have even a strong possibility of coming out of this line. Gilbert Campbell of Augusta County is the best possibility but still a possibility, not an absolute certainty..
The Campbells of Auchinbreck are one of the most unique lines of Campbells, connected by blood and marriage with almost all the other main well-known lines, but often willing to be completely different in behavior. There are not many descendants of this house or its cadets in Virginia history. More were in Jamaica. However, a lot of people over the years have either initially theorized they were out of this family, or have wanted to be so, since the 5th baronet, was quite a rogue and at one time a very wealthy man. Unfortunately, again, this monograph is likely to dash a lot of hopes. He may have had one son in Virginia and that son definitely had a considerable number of descendants but if that son came with any siblings, at least half a dozen good researchers have yet to determine this.
The 5th baronet in particular, never saw a Jacobite rebellion that he and at least some of his family didn’t wish to join, always with disastrous results. This gentleman was a long way from the greatest political or military genius of his age. It was mostly a question of how much rebellion was really possible in the first place and did he really understand that reality. At the same time, this baronet, his predecessors, his kinsmen, many of whom lived in nice homes also, and their families also liked their comfort. Then he was regarded as one of the most significant weasels of the Scottish parliament that voted for the English proposed Act of Union, which in many ways made his later complete political reversal all the more shocking. This complicated combination of this man and his behaviors, is how many descendants of the 5th baronet, ended up immigrating elsewhere, with one dying in exile in Spain, of all places, a daughter in France, and two more sons in Jamaica. Then another one or maybe two in Virginia. You have to admit, though, that the weather in all the places the descendants chose beats most of the year in Scotland, which isn’t terribly far from the Arctic Circle.
To show why and how so few descendants were in the U.S., though meant researching the line as much as possible and presenting it in one place, with all that has been actually documented. I even found two illegitimate sons of the second and fourth baronets and tried to learn what had happened to them and any descendants.
However, from the last years of the 17th century, to 1746, beginning with a bad loan by Sir Duncan Campbell, 4th baronet to the 9th Earl of Argyll for participation in the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion, but principally under estate mismanagement and constant rebellious political schemes of his son, Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet, the House of Auchinbreck went from being one of the wealthiest of all the Campbell houses to bankruptcy. The estates were sequestered for the last time in 1752 and finally sold by 1762, including the manor house at Lochgair. The current holder of the title has no lands in Scotland any more and lives in New Zealand. He is also not a descendant of the 5th baronet, but a descendant of the 3rd laird, through the cadet house of Kilmory. It wasn’t just the main line of Auchinbreck that was ruined because those estates included most of the lands held in fealty by the cadet houses as well. Hundreds of Campbell families suffered from the mismanagement and poor decisions of the baronets.
The cadet house to Auchinbreck of Campbells of Kilmory became larger than the main line of Auchinbreck and sent many more of its descendants to America, particularly, Jamaica and possibly to Virginia. Two sons of the 5th baronet of Auchinbreck also went to Jamaica. Descendants of Kilmory, and its cadet house, Danna, also had scattered properties in Argyllshire, and at one point, in Donegal, Ireland. The current baronet of Auchinbreck, who lives in New Zealand, is a descendant of the cadet house of Kilmory.
However, Argyll itself had many cadet to cadet branches and all through the 17th and 18th century struggled financially, twice borrowing huge amounts from Auchinbreck, most of which was never repaid. Creditors were given lands from Argyll also. The Campbells of Glenorchy were another very large line. The fourth baronet had 27 children of whom at least 9 sons lived to be adults, and there were cadet lines to this house also. Both of these had lesser kinsmen who were tenants who as parents would have been concerned for the futures of their children. At the same time, unless they were helped to emigrate, where someone else paid their way, it was not the poorest who emigrated, not even to Ireland where they were expected to have their own tools, weapons for defense against the dispossessed Irish, and either buy land (when it was available for sale), or more often, pay annual rent. The Scottish settlers in northern Ireland and later North America were mostly middle class farmers and some good tradesmen whose skills and disciplines were high enough to earn a good living, and mostly middle sons of those, middle sons of the lowest levels of gentry, and lower middle class families. Unfortunately not many of these were considered significant enough to be well documented in the clan and peerage genealogies. It will take a search of parish registers at “Scotland’s People” with estimates of birth years for persons known to have been in Ireland in particular places to identify the Scots in Ireland plantations’ settlers, especially after 1650 and comparing the names in documented Scots families with the groupings of Campbells as they were in Ireland..
First it’s important to realize how important land ownership, and the rights to all or most of its produce were to all Scots, including the Campbells, up until the late 1800's. The industrial age did not start until the mid 1800's, anywhere. This means the only livelihood other than fishing or merchant trade, usually greatest in port cities or towns, for the overwhelming majority, well over 80% of the entire population, was agriculture. Even light home industry, to supplement income, usually depended upon raw materials from the land or what could be grown or raised on it. In the UK, industry, and trade, such as it was, was also dominated by and managed for the greatest profits to England, not to any other nation in the dual, later united, kingdom, nor for any colony. Colonies were expected to provide raw materials at low cost and then buy manufactured goods from England mostly. It was not a favorable financial situation for the colonists and could not last.
Land ownership in the UK was very limited, particularly in Scotland and Ireland. Unless a lord or laird had been granted land as a free hold by charter, even he did not own his land, but “held it in fealty” to his own overlord, going up the ladder to either a noble or a clan chief, all the way up to the king. Everyone else was a tenant of someone else, particularly below the level of the hereditary peerage, with the lowest level of peerage being “baronet.” Most Scottish clansmen, even knighted lairds, did not own their land but had to pay rent and had to serve the lord above them in other ways also. They were required as part of their tenanted fealty to follow their overlord into any battle or war the overlord decided to join. If the tenants could not pay rent in coin, they had to pay in kind, produce from the land they tenanted, or in some other service to the lord.
If the lord who owned the land mismanaged or squandered his money and assets, or ended up losing his estates because of rebellion or some other capital crime, everyone beneath him suffered and lost also. A landowner and his own creditors could literally take what they wanted from the tenants. The lands required to be forfeited for rebellion included all the lands of tenants who were beneath the lords also. There was no accountability of the clan chiefs and lords to their lesser, tenant clansmen. There was no security for the tenant clansmen because the lands they lived upon were not their own. Thus the rise and fall of the great estates of Auchinbreck, and other Campbell peers, largely to their own poor decisions and mismanagement affected all the members of the cadet houses, all the tenants, thousands of families beneath them. This was a major reason for emigration when the governors of the North American colonies became willing to offer charters for free-held lands for as little as a schilling payment per year on Michaelmas, for the lifetime of the first owner, and an oath of loyalty to Crown and kingdom in the early 1700's.
The lairdship and later baronetcy of Auchinbreck, in its lands, began with patrimony and free-holdings holdings at Kilmichael, in Glassary, Argyllshire, which continued to hold the court bailey through the life of the sixth baronet, and lands at Auchinbreck at Glendaruel, and Glenlettir in Cowall . The original estate was granted by Duncan an Adh Campbell, Lord Campbell to his third son, born of his second wife, in 1435 by charter. The lands of Auchinbreck in Glendaruel were not the Auchinbreck of Cowall lands, where the castle near Kilmodan was built. That site came later with a Lamont marriage. The lairds and first baronets eventually expanded upon a small, very old castle called Auchinbreck near the village of Kilmodan, which means “Church of St. Modan.” It predates the ownership by the Campbells and possibly also the Lamonts. There is an old graveyard at the church which has effigy tombstones of knights and ladies indicating a likelihood of late 12th or early 13th century origins for the first small church and castellation–probably not much more than a simple tower. This all is from two recent histories of the Campbell Clan, by Alistair Campbell in 2000, and shortly earlier by Diarmid Campbell–the latter was a major leader in the creation and production of the 6 part VHS video-tape series, and documents cited in Highland Papers, vol. IV, by J.R.N MacPhaill, K.C., in 1934. The small church near the castle is referenced in surviving written records dating back to 1250 CE, according to UK websites about the church.
The House of Campbell of Auchinbreck profited and grew in wealth primarily by marriage. In the 1580's, with the help of the then Earl of Argyll and Queen Mary, the young laird of Auchinbreck married Mary McLeod, “the heiress of Harris,” and actually, most of the McLeod clan lands in the islands and in Argyllshire. Her father had been the clan chief and left only a daughter. Her uncle, however, challenged the passing of the lands to the Campbells which resulted in some years of war. The Campbells and McLeods fought to a standstill and a deal was finally made in which most of the lands, except for what where in Argyllshire were retained by the McLeods and the Campbells obtained both the Argyllshire lands and a bride price of 40,000 marks to make up for the lands the Campbells didn’t get. That 40,000 marks helped buy, ultimately other land and made the estate of Auchinbreck large enough to soon qualify for a hereditary title.
In 1610, Sir Dugald Campbell, the son and heir to the McLeod heiress, who became 1st baronet of Auchinbreck, placed a stone version of his coat of arms on a wall of the church, or his castle, and he is likely buried in the church. However, whatever he had of a gravestone/flagstone with his name and dates on it is gone. The castle caught fire and burned in the 1660's and the 3rd baronet died trying to put out the fire. The castle was never rebuilt and fell into ruin, and the farm and mill of “Auchnabreck,” built in the 1800's, took stones from the old castle for these newer structures. The church was rebuilt in 1783, keeping only the wall from the older buildings and retaining in it the coat of arms and initials of Sir Dugald Campbell, 1st baronet Auchinbreck. This coat of arms may be seen to this day in the current church. According to the government site record for Auchinbreck, “the only vestiges remaining visible (of the old castle) are a wall in the center of the garden (of the farm) and the slope on the north side, showing where the castle once stood.” (UK, Government description of the site.)
The castle of Auchinbreck may be the original home of the Campbells of Auchinbreck, though their court baillie was long at Kilmichael. Researchers, who have seen very old and prominent, though now illegible grave-stones at the oldest churchyard in Kilmichael, believe some members of the family of Campbells of Auchinbreck are buried there. There are on-line photographs of some of the earliest grave-stones with remains of relief carvings of individuals. It is not known exactly where the third baronet is buried or when exactly he died. It looks like from the available records he died in 1660. One of the doctor bills for the 3rd baronet, which gives a clue as to when he died is in vol. 1 of Sheriffs Records of Inveraray, which is available on-line courtesy of Clan Campbell. There is a link to this set of primary sources under “sources” in the “history” section of AmeriCeltic.
Over time, after the fire that destroyed the Auchinbreck castle, a mansion at Lochgair/Lochgare was built. This was a major financial setback for the family, having both losses from the fire and then having to build a new home. However, the fourth and fifth baronets, and for a few years, the sixth baronet, lived in the more “modern” and comfortable mansion at Lochgair. In 1762, it passed out of Campbell of Auchinbreck hands, it was later partly, or completely, demolished, rebuilt, and renamed Lochgair House in Lochgair/Lochgare, Argyllshire.
Today, Lochgair is a small, pretty village near Lochgilpinhead in Argyllshire, both along the southern coast of that peninsula in Argyllshire. Auchnabreck, which has the ruins of the old Auchinbreck castle, is now a privately owned farm not owned by any descendants of this line, is in the interior of the peninsula eastward of the Isle of Rothesay, on the opposite side of the firth from Lochgilpinhead. It also is in Argyll and Bute, formerly Argyllshire.
The Campbells of Auchinbreck also briefly acquired and had Carnassarie Castle during the same period that Lochgair was built, which was described as the most secure and most comfortable modern castle. So it was, until it was destroyed by the Scottish forces of James II, harrying the Covenanters after the failed rebellion of Covenanters and Monmouth which had included Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl of Argyll. The loss of Carnassarie Castle was another major financial setback and more was to come. Argyll was also a guardian and feudal overlord of Duncan Campbell, 4th baronet Auchinbreck, under whom the 4th baronet had served in said rebellion as his “colonel of arms,” and from whom Argyll had borrowed 30,000 pounds to make his rebellion. There is an article about the history of Carnassarie Castle written by Diarmid Campbell, a long-time historian for the Dukes of Argyll and Argyllshire, in the “Clan Campbell Society Magazine” in 2014.
The 9th Earl of Argyll was executed on June 30, 1685, for his leading role in the Covenanters Rebellion that had combined with the Monmouth Rebellion, and Duncan Campbell, 4th Baronet Auchinbreck, his colonel by feudal obligations and affection, fled to the court of William and Mary of Orange, with an 1800 marks price on his head–dead or alive. Duncan’s estates were made forfeit and his mansion at Lochgair was assaulted, pillaged and seriously damaged. It was not liveable when the family first saw it again in 1689 and they spent a year having it cleaned up and restored and remodeled while they lived elsewhere, paying rent. Again, it was not an inexpensive situation. Additionally, the Auchinbreck “red boxes” of estate and family records, correspondence and personal journals, etc. were taken. According to the 4th baronet’s wife, the red boxes were returned after the estates had been restored to her husband, and after Lochgair, the seat, had been extensively repaired but, she did not know how much of the original contents remained. The king’s men would have gone through the boxes looking for evidence of treason, an excuse to have the baronet dispossessed and any other major crimes, to allow the estates to be taken and redistributed. Henrietta stated her husband was overjoyed at the return of the boxes but nothing more was said of the contents.
Duncan Campbell, 4th baronet Auchinbreck, became a Captain of exiled Scots under William of Orange, and an adviser to William, as per his wife Henriette’s journals, now in the National Library of Scotland. He regained his estates in 1689 as William prevailed and became King of England and Scotland. Duncan was well rewarded for his services to William and for a time it seemed that the family and its estates were prospering again. By November, 1700, when Duncan Campbell, the 4th baronet died in his own bed, and not in a prison, or on the “maiden,” an early Scottish form of guillotine, despite having loaned the 9th Earl of Argyll, 30,000 pounds for the ill-fated rebellion, Duncan was still one of the wealthiest of all Scots at the time.
Duncan Campbell’s only legitimate son, James, the 5th baronet Auchinbreck, was a Jacobite supporter, as later events would show. His activities started in 1715, and with them the hastening of the end of the great estate and wealth of Auchinbreck. James, by this time, through his paternal grandmother, was more closely related to the House of Cawdor than to Argyll. His maternal grandmother’s kinsmen had also become Jacobites, the McKenzies of Seaforth. His parents were dead by this time and he was free of the intense Covenanter influence of his mother and maternal grandmother, who though a McKenzie, was a leading Covenanter. When he received a letter from his great-uncle, Sir Hugh Campbell, Thane of Cawdor commanding him to raise the men of Auchinbreck and join the Earl of Mar’s 1715 rebellion, he quickly agreed to the demand, but could not physically do so. James Campbell of Auchinbreck’s feudal overlord in land and title was still Argyll and the Duke of Argyll had learned the hard lesson of his father and grandfather and was King George’s commander in Scotland. The Duke of Argyll was supported by the Covenanters south of him in Ayrshire, as well as his own immediate followers in Argyllshire. Ayrshire had some split loyalties but was mostly pro-Protestant, as most clans there were headed by Presbyterians. Dumbartonshire further south was solidly pro United Kingdom and Argyll and was quick to muster and swept up and through Ayrshire neutralizing any sympathy and picking up additional support. Geographically, the solidity of southwest Scotland with Argyll cut off Auchinbreck from the rest of the rebellion rendering him impotent.
Argyll and the king George I, noticing that Auchinbreck was personally absent from the forces of Argyll to confront the rebels, ordered Auchinbreck to “make his excuses for his absence” (a document of 1716, found in the Public Records Office by Mr. Bruce Bishop, Scottish genealogist, proves this, as stated in an email forwarded to me). Argyll lost honor and support of the king because the eastern Campbells under the Thane of Cawdor and Earl of Breadalbane had actively rebelled and Auchinbreck didn’t act in any way to support Argyll. All these events split Clan Campbell itself, weakened all the Campbell lords and clansmen, costing all of them financially. The Hanover king demanded financial forfeits before pardoning some of the rebels, including Auchinbreck, and was not awarding any more lands or rights to collect royal rents or fees to them. Some Campbells were even among the list of nearly 700 transported to America in punishment after the loss at Preston. (“Transported Jacobite Rebels of 1716: a Complete Listing" by Clifford Neal Smith, March, 1976, “National Genealogical Society Quarterly,” vol. 64, no. 1, put on-line at Genealogy.com, Maryland Forum, by Hugh Tornabene in July, 2003).
Then in 1719, little more than two years after his pardon and fines being paid, James the 5th baronet Auchinbreck was, along with his McKenzie kin, who led this one, involved in the “little rebellion” of Glenshiel. Worse, his second son, James Jr. was among the active soldiers of 1716, and the leaders had invited the Spanish to join in the revolt, since Spain had recently declared war on England and its allies from an earlier continental war, to retake Sicily and southern Italy. The Spanish did send ships and a contingent of 250 men who fought alongside the Scottish rebels and helped evacuate them to the Continent, mostly to Spain, when the rebellion failed.
This time there would be no pardon. George I ordered that all Scots caught fleeing the Glenshiel battlefield be executed. The 5th baronet was now under deep suspicion by the Hanovers and being watched. When he engaged in correspondence with the next group of rebels starting again in 1741 and the rebellion began in earnest in 1745, he was quickly caught and imprisoned, and some of his estates made forfeit, those not already encumbered by debt in the baronet’s ill-fated schemes. This was pretty much the end of the estates and wealth of Auchinbreck, and good reasons for his younger sons, who did not share his delusions, to leave. Well before this 1745 rebellion, James’ third son, Gilbert, may have already gone to Virginia He was stated to have gone to Virginia some years before in a lawsuit in 1757, and then again in 1760. . At about this time, or shortly after, James’ younger sons, William and Alexander, born between 1718-1734, went to Jamaica, where they already had cousins.
The Auchinbreck estates had also included proprietorship of most of the lands of the cadet houses of Kilmory and Danna. This mass exodus of so many males of this family leads to the next issue in this monograph.
Most researchers are familiar with the confusion of Burke’s identifying the children of the 2nd baronet of Auchinbreck. Burke’s contributors at various times identified the children of this generation, as ‘children of this generation’, or, some as ‘children of the second son of the third baronet’, who died relatively young. However, the 5th baronet has given researchers even more fits. He had three wives, and at least 12 children who lived to adulthood, plus their many descendants. This generation is especially vexing since almost none of them were left in Scotland, or Ireland by the time the 6th baronet died. This situation sent the administrators of what was left of title and estate scrambling to find another successor. The next baronet ended up about a 5th cousin to the 6th!
In July, 1717, the Parliament and King George I grew weary of the time and money being spent on investigating and punishing the Scots and an “Act of Indemnity” was passed which forgave the rest of the rebels who had not yet been punished if they gave an oath of loyalty to King George I. Most of the unpunished rebels and sympathizers did so, and James Campbell, 5th baronet, Auchinbreck, was among them. In December, 1717, James, now a widower, his first wife having died just a few years before, married again and went to London to do so. Trust me, finding his marriage record was a major research ordeal. The church marriage record is in LONDON, England, just about the last place in the world one would look for a Scottish lord who had just tried to participate in the 1715 rebellion. Copies of his marriage contracts, however, were eventually found by a genealogist in Scotland, and of course, were not available on-line. It took Mr. Bishop several weeks to find the marriage contract for the baronet’s first marriage to Janet McLeod written in June-July, 1696. The first marriage took place at that time.
I found the marriage record for the second marriage by tracing the movements of the new Thane of Cawdor, Sir John Campbell, after his grandfather, the old Thane, Sir Hugh had died in March, 1716. It turned out that after John’ father, the oldest son of the old Thane, Sir Alexander Campbell died in 1698, the mother of the next Thane, Elizabeth (Lort) Campbell took her children to live with her family in London. Then her first son, Gilbert, died in February, 1711, at just about the age of 21, leaving a minor brother, John, under a trust fund and the tutelage of his mother and his paternal grandfather. According to the book Thanes of Cawdor, written by John’s descendant from the generations of family materials, John then spent some time in Scotland on occasion, but his principal residence was in London and that is where his sisters, Susanna and Anna also resided. In 1714, John’s mother died, leaving John solely under the care of his grandfather. However, by March, 1716, the old thane, Sir Hugh, was dead and John was now free, and permanently back in London, and Wales, where he was tearing down the old Lort castle and having a Georgian Palladian style mansion built in its place. It was much more politically and socially beneficial to not be in Scotland. John then married a Welsh heiress, himself, Mary Pryce of Gogarthen/Gogarddyn in 1726.. He was in charge of his sisters from about 1714 on and they were yet minors/dependents under the law when his mother had died. John had to approve their marriages. This is why and how John Campbell of Cawdor became the Welsh Campbell.
John Campbell also had been the person who was to have met James Campbell, 5th baronet of Auchinbreck and join the men of Islay and Auchinbreck’s estates to the Earl of Mar’s rebellion. They had become fast friends, as well as being cousins, by 1716. It was through John Campbell, his cousin, that the 5th baronet knew of the Lort inheritance and met John’s sister Susanna and decided to marry her. She had inherited already, upon the death of her oldest brother, several thousand pounds and was due more upon her marriage.
Without the 1716 “Act of Indemnity,” which pardoned the 1715 rebels, James Campbell the 5th baronet Auchinbreck never could have visited and married a second time in London. Given the participation of his second son, in the Rebellion of Glenshiel in 1719, the period of 1717-18 was a very narrow window for the 5th baronet Auchinbreck in being in tolerably good graces with the Crown.
The 5th baronet’s second marriage, said by Burke’s Peerage to have been to a Susanna/Susannah Campbell of Cawdor, had not been found in Scotland, until August 2015. Most importantly, there was no record of it found in either the Scottish Public Records Office catalog to the archives of the Campbells of Cawdor at Nairn, nor the Campbell of Cawdor archives for their Pembrokeshire period, now at the National Trust Archives for Carmarthenshire. It was also not known precisely when the 5th baronet’s first marriage had occurred, or how old he was when he married, or when exactly he was born, for a long time. There were too many “about this year’s” in the contributions to Burke’s and other books, and too many ranges of more than 5 years.
Thus, for a long time, researchers and analysts were looking at two possibilities for the identity of a name that somehow kept appearing in the contributions to Burke’s Peerage, a Susanna/Susannah Campbell of Cawdor. It wasn’t until this year, 2015, that enough pieces, with solid, well-documented dates, together, of this long-standing puzzle finally made their way on-line to resolve it.
James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck, married as his second wife, Susanna Campbell, a grand-daughter of the deceased Sir Hugh Campbell, Thane of Cawdor, and also grand-daughter of the deceased Sir John of Lort, baronet of Stackpole in Pembrokeshire, 21 December, 1717, at St. James Church, Piccadilly in the city of Westminster (now part of London), Middlesex, England. He married her in England, not at Cawdor Castle in Nairn, Scotland, and not Stackpole Court at Pembrokeshire in Wales. It was just about the last place anyone would have expected to find this marriage, and about the last place we all searched.
This Susanna Campbell was a grand-daughter of Sir Hugh Campbell, Thane of Cawdor, through his oldest son, Alexander, who had four children but predeceased his father. Alexander Campbell married the heiress, Elizabeth Lort of Stackpole Court, Pembrokeshire whose parents had built a mansion in Turnham Green just outside of London, noted in a Gazette of the early 1700's. Without knowing that the Lort family had this townhouse in London and that it both passed to, and was used by, the Lort heir’s grandson, John Campbell of Cawdor, the recently placed on line index to the Westminster parish registries by Family Search, was meaningless. The index to the parish registry also had simply “James Campbell to Susanna Campbell.” There was no title for the gentleman given in the index. There were also over 600 records for Campbells in Westminster between 1680-1730. The Lort Inheritance Suit also had a margin note about this marriage, separate from the case papers, and did not indicate that the marriage was for the baronet and not his son of the same name, who was also of age.
In 1699, the widow Susanna Lort was living in what was then a fine new, architecturally attractive mansion in the Westminster, Piccadilly area near Turnham Green. The antique gazette article about it turned up this year, 2015, on-line. From exploring what else about this family might be in London records, I learned that Susanna, her husband, and her oldest Campbell grandson, named Gilbert, who died just about as he reached 21 in February, 1711, are all interred in London, as per on-line registers of Westminster interments. (Sources for marriage data are: index to St. James parish registers, Westminster, found at “Family Search,” which listed him as simply, “James Campbell;”Lort Inheritance Suit, 1760, original files at Bodleian library at Oxford, reviewed by University of Minnesota senior law student, Mary Norman, in which she noted the marriage record and notes in the margin about it only stated Sir James Campbell, not baronet, of Auchinbreck; finally email from Hilary Davies archivist and researcher at Westminster sent photocopy of the register itself showing, at long last, this was the baronet and not his of age son, James Campbell, the younger. Hence the comment in the introduction about erroneous indices making it harder to determine truths.)
Up until the end of August, 2015, nothing had been found to document any marriage of Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet to any Susanna Campbell, either as a daughter of an Archibald or an Alexander. Regarding determination of which of both possible marriages really occurred, E-mails were sent to the designated addresses for librarians/curators of the two Campbell of Cawdor archives. The first was the Public Records Office in Scotland which has a catalog of the Campbell of Cawdor archives at Cawdor Castle of Nairn and lists marriages of the family members. Additionally, a second archives for the Campbells of Cawdor during their 250 year sojourn in Pembrokeshire, Wales, and London, was found to have been left by the Campbells of Cawdor at the National Trust Archives branch at Carmarthenshire, in Wales. Replies from both of these curators/designated researchers had stated there was no record of any marriage of Sir James Campbell of Auchinbreck to ANY Susanna/Susannah Campbell of Cawdor in the family records. This had only added to the confusion as to who really married Susanna Campbell in Westminster in 1717 and to knowing if this young lady was even the sister of Sir John Campbell, the Thane by 1717.
Worse for researchers, the 5th baronet’s second son was also named James, and James the younger, was “of age” to sign legal documents in 1716 as shown by the Sheriffs Records of Inveraray, vol. 1, placed on-line by Clan Campbell. He was described in this record as “son and fiar of Sir James Campbell, baronet of Auchinbreck,” and drafted, witnessed, signed and filed the marriage contract for his “cousin of Strondour” in March, 1716. According to documents in the Lort inheritance suit, James Campbell, the younger, “also was in London for a few years before going to Spain where he died in about 1744.” Again, the same suit has a margin note about the existence of a marriage record, and did not state this was the baronet. There was also no death data for the first wife of the 5th baronet that had, or still has, been found.
Without the kind archivist at the Westminster archives itself, finding and photographing the marriage register itself, there was literally no certain documentation of which James Campbell had married Susanna Campbell of Cawdor. Either James, father or son, could have done so and she was closer in age to James, the younger, who had not been previously married. Until late August, 2015, there was not any certainty that the 5th baronet ever had any second wife named Susanna/Susannah Campbell!
This marriage register is also the only proof that that Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck, was ever in London after 1715, after he received the letter from his great-uncle Sir Hugh Campbell who had commanded him to join the rebellion, and Auchinbreck then failed to support Argyll, King George’s commander. Based on the letter from George I to the sheriffs of Scotland that was delivered to all the heads of houses of the various clans, ordering them, if they had participated in the rebellion, to turn themselves into the sheriffs for the king’s justice, and or any men who had followed them or were under their command likewise, the baronet was in jeopardy of his life and estates had the correspondence with Sir Hugh Campbell been found. Fortunately, Hugh died conveniently at the time the sheriff of Nairn was delivering his copy of the king’s letter and his rebellious correspondence was not discovered and remained in the family archives until used by a descendant for the first book on the family, The Thanes of Cawdor.
However, Auchinbreck, himself, had no way of knowing that someone loyal to Sir Hugh had discreetly stashed his correspondence and that it would not turn up. Until the Act of Indemnity, Auchinbreck could not be safe anywhere in the Isles and thus there was no reason to believe he was likely to be going to London any time after 1715. He would have received a chilly reception, if not “cut direct,” socially, among most of London Society. Sir Hugh Campbell of Cawdor, escaped punishment, because he was ill and died soon after delivery of the sheriff’s letter and in this event, all those with whom he’d corresponded were spared also. Sir Hugh Campbell, Thane of Cawdor, died 11 March, 1716 and was interred 29th March, 1716. (Source: The Thanes of Cawdor, by John Campbell, 1st Earl of Cawdor, in 1852, as a compilation of transcriptions of thousands of primary source records from the family archives at Cawdor Castle at Nairn)
The other alleged marriage for Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet, to Susannah Campbell, daughter of Archibald “Roy” Campbell, Baillie for his first cousin, Sir Hugh Campbell, Thane of Cawdor, for the Thane’s Islay properties, also has no record, as stated before. Of course it will never have any record, as it never occurred.
This is a good time to discuss the line of Archibald Roy Campbell. Through his daughters, some of whom did marry other Campbells, his descendants ended up in what became the U.S. Kinsmen, Campbells of Sunderlin, Archibald’s maternal kin, also ended up in the U.S. when John Campbell, Thane of Cawdor, sold their lands out from under them.
Archibald “Roy Campbell,” NOT the Father of Any Known Susannah Campbell
Archibald Roy Campbell was a natural son of Sir Hugh’s younger uncle, Duncan who died in the service of his country in Ireland, in about 1650 leaving his 8 year old son, Archibald. Duncan had intended to marry the child’s mother, when sent off to serve, and may have hand-fasted with her. The book, Thanes of Cawdor, a compilation of numerous exact citations of primary source records in the centuries of the Thanes’ red boxes and such, makes it clear the young Archibald Campbell was considered a full member of the Campbells of Cawdor family, and cared for and educated by Hugh’s remaining uncles and himself. Archibald was mostly raised at Cawdor Castle at Nairn, in what is now Inverness-shire, along with Hugh and was a favorite of Hugh. As an adult, Archibald “Roy” Campbe.l was made Baillie of the Cawdor estates on Islay and given a small estate called “Octomore” for himself, personally. Archibald Roy Campbell, according to Campbell of Sunderland/Sunderlin records, married a sister of the then laird of Sunderland, on Islay shortly after 1660.
For those people who descend from the Campbells of Sunderlin/Sunderland, here are a few items about them. First they are part of the Campbells of Cawdor, as they were brought from the area around Nairn to settle and help control Islay after 1615, when the Campbells of Cawdor had acquired Islay from the McDonalds. The wife of Archibald “Roy” Campbell was identified in a record of the Sheriffs of Inveraray, as a Campbell of Sunderlin. Her given name is stated, without substantiation, as yet, as either “Mary” or Christian.” However, her mother’s name was Mary; Mary was another sister of Sir Hugh Campbell, Thane of Cawdor. Mary/Christian’s father had a sister named Christian. So, either name is possible. Archibald had only daughters, usually named as, Christian, Anne, Margaret, Catherine and Jean and two of them married other Campbells. Archibald “Roy Campbell was succeeded in his little holding of Octomore, and as Baillie of Islay, by a son-lin-law and nephew, a George Campbell of Sunderlin, to whom he’d married one of his daughters. This does not say there were not more daughters, just that these five are the ones about which people have found documents, so far. Archibald Roy Campbell’s daughters were born in the 1660's and 1670's and most were married in the 1680's. He died about 1700. There are no records for him after 1700.
Campbells of Sunderlin/Sunderland also sent emigrants to America. During the last years of Sir Hugh Campbell, Thane of Cawdor, mortgages had been granted to tenant families on Islay, including the Campbells of Sunderlin/Sunderland to buy the land upon which they lived. Sir Hugh’s grandson John, then sold the lands, and the mortgages for about 12,000 pounds to Donald Campbell of Shawfield by 1722, making the mortgages of the tenants null and void and without refunds of payments made on those mortgages to the tenants. It made them landless tenants again, and “caused many on Islay to emigrate.” Additionally, there was a terrible smallpox epidemic in 1717-18 and an illness among the sheep giving additional reasons to leave. The island was considered by 1722 unlucky and unhealthy.
Another important item that helped solve the puzzle of the 5th baronet of Auchinbreck’s marriages came from the McLeod Archives at the Public Records Office in Edinburgh, Scotland, this year. It is the marriage contract for Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck, dated 11th of July, 1696 to Janet McLeod, his FIRST wife. This makes it impossible for him to have married any daughter of Archibald Roy Campbell, unless she was a widow and married much later. There is no evidence for this. The baronet’s second marriage was to Susanna Campbell of Cawdor, Alexander’s daughter, not a daughter of Archibald. Complicating all of this was also the fact that Burke’s Peerage, itself, in various annual editions, had Archibald as well as Alexander listed as the name of the father of Susannah, making what it claimed for family history questionable. Everything that has ever been said of this family in Burke’s has had to be checked for documentation of whatever reality as very little documentation was ever cited in Burke’s.
From the records that do exist and have finally all surfaced, Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck was indeed married three times. Burke’s was correct in this, though there were no citations of actual records and not even dates given for any of the marriages in this too-often used secondary (if even that) source. It gets even more tangled after this.
Additionally, Burke’s, and others, were confused as to which children were from which wives and had no birth dates for any of them. Two children of the first marriage have often been listed among those from the second marriage, and yet a distinction was made that showed an unstated difference in relationships in two lawsuits in the late 1750's and 1760's. One of those lawsuits became a major landmark in English and U.S. Common Law and legal monographs about this suit have been published off and on to the present day for almost 250 years at this point. Gilbert and Anne Campbell, two children, who Burke tried to state were children of the 5th baronet of Auchinbreck’s second marriage, were actually children of his first marriage by Janet McLeod, daughter of Iain “Breac” McLeod, clan chief of Clan McLeod. Janet, by the way, was an older sister to Norman McLeod, not his daughter. The McLeod official family tree of the chiefs have this correct. Anne, was shown by Cameron memoirs written during her lifetime in France, to have been married in 1730-31 and thus born before 1715. Her year of birth is about 1711. In the two lawsuits, Gilbert is repeatedly stated to be her OLDER brother, between her and another older brother, James, who was of age to sign contracts in 1716. Gilbert Campbell is also stated in the 1757 lawsuit to have ALREADY gone to Virginia.
The second Gilbert Campbell in Virginia, who has often been thought to be the third son of the 5th baronet of Auchinbreck, is younger than Anne Campbell who married Cameron of Lochiel in 1730-31. This second, younger, Gilbert Campbell went to Virginia, arriving on June 12, 1765, as a customs official appointed from London under a new laws passed between 1763 and 1767–documented. (Lort Inheritance Lawsuit 1760-1, found in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and reviewed by Mary Norman, senior law student at the University of Minnesota in 2010; Kames Reporter article about this suit and a related lawsuit of 1757 found by Mr. Bruce Bishop, Scots genealogist.)
The second, younger, Gilbert Campbell was found by records to have left two children born in the 1750’s and was assumed for a time to have been born sometime in the early 1730’s. However, an examination of baptismal records added online since 2015 showed he had at least one more child born much earlier, a son Gilbert, born in 1741 who lived 3 weeks. Gilbert Campbell customs controller was married to Christian or Christiana Bell whose mother was Margaret Pinkston Bell, as per the will of Margaret’s brother, Dr. Fleming Pinkston, in London in 1790, which named his sister, her daughter’s husband and grandchildren. It’s absolutely certain that the child who was born and died in 1741 was the first child of Gilbert and Christian (Bell) Campbell. Another Gilbert who may or may not have been Gilbert and Christian’s second son of the same name as the baby brother, died in 1746, aged 3 years. However, two Gilbert’s were living in that area at that time and the interment record did not state the parents of the child. This all means that this, younger Gilbert Campbell of Westmoreland County, Virginia, married Christian Bell about 1739/40 and was born not later than 1718, but more likely between 1715 and 1717, given the normal age range for marriage of young adult males at this time, based on several studies of known, documented marriages with enough data to know ages.
Some descendants of this Gilbert Campbell have believed he was a child of the 5th baronet Auchinbreck by his second wife, but it is not very likely as this Gilbert was married in mid 1740 at the latest and was of age and older when married. Auchinbreck married his second wife in December, 1717 and the earliest he would have had his next child was at the end of 1718. It’s barely possible, but two lawsuits, one in 1757 also state that the baronet’s son Gilbert was already in Virginia before 1757 and this Gilbert did not arrive until 1765. . Another theory, before finding the first child’s baptismal and death records was that he was a third son of Sir John Campbell, Thane of Cawdor. This Gilbert had named his second son, Pryce/Pryse/Price (all three spellings are in the records) Campbell and John’s wife’s maiden surname was Pryse/Pryce. Unfortunately for that theory, John was married in 1726, his first son, named Pryce was born in 1727 and all others later, and this Gilbert Campbell who was the customs controller was married by about mid 1740 at the latest. Who this second Gilbert Campbell’s parents were is still a mystery but there were at least four older Gilbert Campbells in England by 1730, and Sir Archibald Campbell of Clunes, the next younger brother to John Campbell, Thane of Cawdor’s deceased father, Alexander, also had a son named Gilbert about whom the unreliable Burke’s Peerage stated only that he was born in 1707–with no documentation.
The third and last marriage of Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck was to Margaret Campbell, daughter of the deceased Donald Campbell of the Campbells of Glencarradale. According to the “settlement agreement for her and children by her, should James the baronet predecease her,” which was filed with the Sheriff of Inveraray in 1739, he married her 20th of April, 1736. (Source: Sheriffs Records of Inveraray, vol. 1, found on-line, courtesy of Clan Campbell)
The family fortune fell apart during the life of the Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet, who never saw a rebellion he, and later his second son James, didn’t want to join–good or bad, practical or futile. Beside this, of 15 or 16 children born to the 5th baronet, he had 12 children who survived infancy. That was a large number to be fed, clothed, educated, and for whom to be otherwise provided in the manner of the day, for even lower levels of gentry. The 5th baronet had also been an active member of the Scottish parliament for several years, succeeding his father, after a brief hiatus. This indicates that the 5th baronet was NOT Catholic, but Protestant, in stated and observed religion for those few who still want to believe that because he was a Jacobite, he was a Catholic. His father, Duncan Campbell, the 4th baronet, had changed his religion in the last two years of his life to Catholicism, but his wife and son did NOT join him. Since the Scottish parliament did not allow Catholics to hold seats, Duncan had to surrender his seat in 1698, and this was noted by the Parliament records keepers. Shortly after Duncan’s death in November, 1700, which also was noted by the Parliament, his son, James, was able to take the seat of his father. He could not have done so if he had been Catholic. A seat in the Scottish Parliament was a partly hereditary role and privilege, and partly obligation and service that benefitted all his clansmen under his House and living in his estate areas. Members of Parliament, then, as Congresspersons today, obtained privileges, rights and benefits for the people in the district they represented. More than just the baronet’s family benefitted from him serving in Parliament. Unlike, now, however, members of the Scottish Parliament paid most of their own expenses, including travel to and from home, the cost of parliamentary staff, and a residence near the Parliament. Despite all the expenses of a large family, and the expenses of serving in Parliament some distance from his usual residences, James Campbell, 5th baronet, also was among members of the Scottish parliament who traveled to London a few times, with at least part of his family, to lobby for better terms for the Act of Union between 1704 and 1707. Those trips were not inexpensive, either.
In the histories of the Act of Union, it’s stated that the first proposal was a complete disaster and rejected by a large majority of the members of the Scottish Parliament. The second proposal was not seen as much better. Parliament met in Edinburgh, understandably, as it was the national capitol, but also at times in Perth. Edinburgh at this time was still “auld Reekie” particularly in the summer. The estates and residences of Auchinbreck were in the opposite side of the country. Roads were abysmal, and getting from Lochgair to Edinburgh, took a couple of days’ travel, not hours, even though it was only 60 miles. Getting to London was even worse, especially if one was bringing any significant part of his family. Sir James also seemed to be an indifferent, uninterested estate manager. There is no evidence that he took an interest in the economy of his estates and worked to improve them. He and his father were shrewd about loaning money with interest, except to the Earls of Argyll, and that seems to have been a significant mainstay of his estates, lifestyle and political activities, when the amounts being lent were not huge and were repaid. (Sources: Sheriffs Records of Inveraray, vol. 1; The Thanes of Cawdor, by the first Earl of Cawdor) The Thanes of Cawdor, themselves, were once significantly indebted to Auchinbreck, but unlike Argyll, repaid their debts to Auchinbreck. (Lort Inheritance Suit, discussion about the Tripartite Agreement and other financial matters.)
At the same time, the Campbells of Auchinbreck generally, is the house of Campbells that comprises most Campbells who settled in Pennsylvania and Virginia in the early to mid 18th centuries, though NOT the main house of Auchinbreck. Many Campbells out of this house were through two lines, whom together, were out of cadet houses to the Auchinbreck cadet house of Kilmory–two rungs down the hierarchical ladder of Auchinbreck.
Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck, firmly ensconced himself in history as “the Jacobite Campbell,” when he became one of the 13 lords who encouraged “Bonnie Prince Charlie” to attempt to regain the United Kingdom Crown, all having signed a letter of support for this sent to Cardinal Fleury. James, the 5th baronet, never minded the fact his grandson and heir James, son of deceased son Duncan or his third son, Gilbert, who ended up burdened with many affairs of the estate at times, did not approve of, or agree with, repeated rebellion, and did not support James, the baronet in this scheme, and didn’t know anything of it. After the death of the 5th baronet, there were many of his descendants who never mentioned being related to him again and were quite content to forget him and Auchinbreck. It was all gone any way, nothing remaining for any of them in Scotland.
The best evidence thus far is that the Gilbert Campbell who was in Augusta County was the Gilbert, son of James Campbell, the 5th baronet Auchinbreck, who settled in Virginia. He’s the only one of the baronet’s immediate family proved to have settled in Virginia. He was stated in a lawsuit related to the Lort Inheritance suit, and another filed a few years earlier, to have gone to Virginia. He is also identified in this suit as the older brother of Anne Campbell. Anne Campbell, herself is identified in The History of Cameron, published in 1884, citing primary source memoirs of the Camerons in 18th century France, where they went into exile, and described in this account as having married Sir Donald Cameron, “Gentle Lochiel” of the 1745 rebellion in 1730-1. Anne and Donald had their first child and son in 1732. Thus Anne was born between 1710-1713, most likely 1711/12. This means her OLDER brother Gilbert was born BEFORE 1710, and AFTER 1699, after their brother James second son of James, the 5th baronet, was born in 1698/9.
Gilbert Campbell of Augusta, married Prudence Osman/Osman in about 1723 or 1724 at the latest, given baptismal records of two of their oldest grandchildren, and there has been no record thus far found of the marriage in Pennsylvania. There is not even any “tradition” of the marriage having occurred in Pennsylvania. It is more likely that when and if a marriage record is ever found, it will be in Scotland. Though family history researchers initially believed the Osmans/Osmuns were German, records have been found in Pennsylvania and in Scotland to show they are Scottish. One branch lived in Perthshire and moved southward and there are records of them on-line. They were geographically close to Auchinbreck’s kinsmen of Cawdor. The best evidence is, thus far, again, that Gilbert Campbell came to America with his Osman/Osmun in-laws, some of whom eventually were in Lancaster County, before it was split into several additional counties–except for one problem. The earliest Osman’s were not in Lancaster County at the time that Gilbert was known or believed to have been there, but later. His closest associations were with Wallace’s, who had property and business on both sides of the Irish sea and were in County Down in Ireland and Ayrshire and Glasgow in Scotland, and then the Wallace cousins, the Woods. This Gilbert’s second daughter married Richard Woods, and Gilbert lived close to Woods and Wallaces in Augusta County where he moved in 1739.
There is a report–with no citation of an actual record that stated he had 400 acres along Conogouinet Creek in Lancaster County in 1734. There is no corresponding land record of a patent or sale. However, if one is found, it will show his two nearest neighbors as per land records, patents and surveys, were a John and Oliver Wallace. These were documented close relatives of Andrew Wallace (wills and transactions in Cecil County, Maryland records found in Prerogative court records), one of whom had come north from further south on the “eastern shore” of Maryland. Andrew Wallace was the older brother of Samuel Wallace who had married Elizabeth Woods, and died while preparing to emigrate. His widow, Elizabeth had arrived with her children, and her brother, Samuel Woods and his family in about 1728/29 (earliest records in PA were for 1729), and as per land and will records, Elizabeth and her children initially settled next to Andrew Wallace and the two families had a few transactions. DNA tests of descendants show these two lines are closely related, as well as lines from another brother, William who had arrived with Andrew, and cousins who had arrived a generation earlier and settled further south on the eastern shore. .
The Gilbert Campbell of Augusta County, Virginia, had been born in Scotland about 1700 and married about 1723. He had three children already married when he died in 1751 (will proved in Augusta County, Virginia), and at least three grandchildren. It should be noted that this older Gilbert Campbell, named his oldest son, JAMES, and then pointedly named his second son, “George,” several years before his putative reprobate father, Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck, engaged in his last, most ruinous, rebellion.
The only other Gilbert Campbell in Virginia in the 18th century was a Gilbert Campbell born between about 1715-1718, who named his oldest son Gilbert in 1741, and his second son PRYSE/Pryce Campbell, born in 1759–in LONDON. This second Gilbert was a London appointed customs official for the lower Potomac River and adjacent area of the Chesapeake Bay, who had been appointed under the first onerous post French and Indian war tax acts, of 1763 and later required to enforce the Townshend Acts of 1767-8 and arrived in 1765 and settled in Westmoreland County, as mentioned before. According to the 1757 lawsuit involving members of the Auchinbreck Campbells, it was stated that Gilbert Campbell of that line was ALREADY in Virginia before 1757–long before 1765 when the second Gilbert Campbell first arrived, with children born in the 1750’s in London..
When, in 1745, the 2nd large rebellion, on behalf of “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” was defeated at Culloden, Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck, was arrested in his home in November, 1745, and soon imprisoned by his more distant kinsman and feudal overlord, the Duke of Argyll, at the Castle of Dumbarton for a bit over a year. The records of “Prisoners of 1745 and the Rebellion” indicate that when the baronet was arrested, the red boxes of Auchinbreck were again confiscated and searched by the king’s agents. There is no record that they were ever returned. He was then released to his home in Lochgair/Lochgare under little more than house arrest, but constantly watched afterward by early 1747. He was especially exempted from pardon and remained a branded traitor the rest of his life and virtually all of his estates were either forfeited to the Crown or his creditors. The last few pieces were sold by his heir, his only grandson by his oldest, deceased son, in 1762. The 5th baronet of Auchinbreck died October 14th, 1756 at about 82 years of age, and virtually bankrupt..
The Puzzle and Debate of the Birthdate of Sir James Campbell, 5th Baronet Auchinbreck and his Mother’s Birth Year and Marriage Year.
The age and birth year of Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet, and his own parents’ marriage year were additional subjects of raging debates which are ended by proof of his mother in her own journals, some parts of which are in Ladies of the Covenant, and the contents of some of his maternal grandmother’s letters, both now in the National Library of Scotland. At one point, there was little, except the death date of James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck, that wasn’t a subject of debate. Again, however, in recent years, a number of items have come on-line, or been published that finally resolve these questions.
Henriette Lindsay, youngest daughter of Sir Alexander Lindsay, 1st Earl of Balcarres and his wife Anna McKenzie, a daughter of the 1st Earl of Seaforth, was named for Henriette Marie of France, the wife of King Charles I (Stuart) of England and Scotland, and was according to her own diary “not quite two when her father died.” Unfortunately for Henriette, her mother, Anna’s, letters and other papers, show she was slightly older, about 3 years of age. Also her mother, Anna McKenzie-Lindsay, had been the governess for the future William of Orange from mid-1655 to early 1659 when her father went into his last health decline. Her father died 7 September 1659 in the old calendar style, 30th August, 1659, new calendar. He was, by all contemporary accounts, nearly a complete invalid the last two years of his life, and in sad decline for about a year before that. The evidence from her mother’s letters and papers is that Henriette was most likely born in the spring or summer of 1656. Henriette, though, definitely was not born at Balcarres. She, alone of all the children of Alexander Lindsay, 1st Earl of Balcarres and his wife, Anna McKenzie, of the McKenzies of Seaforth, was not baptized at Kilconquhar and has no exact baptismal date among the Lindsay records in Scotland. So she was not born in Scotland and was correct in that statement. She was born after the family fled into exile to France in January, 1654.
The Lindsays were Jacobites, but not Catholics. Sir Alexander Lindsay and his wife were Covenanters, but supporters of the Stuarts as kings, and of Charles I only if he would tolerate the Covenanters. It was complicated. Alexander ended up with the unhappy task, given to him by the Scottish Parliament, of demanding that King Charles I sign a document accepting the Covenant for a church without bishops as the official church of Scotland before Charles could be let into Scotland as Charles was fleeing Cromwell. When Charles I refused to sign, the saddened Lindsay who really didn’t want to see the king abandoned completely, had to leave him to Cromwell. After Cromwell had Charles I executed, Lindsay helped persuade the Scottish Parliament to offer the crown to Charles II and became an unwavering Stuart supporter at that point, nearly bankrupting himself to do so, and ruining his health into the bargain. This led to conflict with Cromwell and his supporters in Scotland. At the end of 1653, failure of the “Glencairn Rising” then led to Alexander himself having to flee to the European continent for his life and take most of his family with him, where they joined Charles II and his widowed mother, Henriette Marie in France in May, 1654.
For more on this, read Anna, Countess of the Covenant, by Mrs. Mary McGrigor, 2008, Birlinn Ltd., Edinburgh. A number of the letters of Anna are cited, as are other documents, and items from the Lindsay archives that appeared in books written by the Earl of Lindsay and Crawford, a direct descendant of Alexander and Anna (McKenzie) Lindsay, in the mid 1800's.
Duncan Campbell, 4th baronet Auchinbreck, and Henriette Lindsay, youngest daughter of the 1st Earl of Balcarres, were married when Henrietta was in her “15th or 16th year, in the summer of that year.” (From extracts of her journals and the family papers of Rev. Anderson whose grandfather had been a chaplain to her and received the journals in Ladies of the Covenant.) However, this is not quite correct.
When Henriette was 16, she made a declaration to her family that she was “dedicating her life to the service of Christ the Redeemer,” and was at Balcarres at the time. This is in her journals. Additionally, her brother and the chaplain at Balcarres were alarmed at her claiming to have dreams and visions of Satan as a large black dog wandering the woods of Balcarres. However, Henriette stated that she wasn’t worried, because she was eventually seeing the dog on a leash, taking this to mean God was protecting her. Henriette’s mother, Anna, became concerned that Henriette was becoming somewhat deranged and summoned her to Inveraray at that time. Anna had already had one daughter experience extreme religious fervor across the same teenage years as Henriette was having her own experiences. The first round of extreme religious fervor had been disastrous for Anna’s hopes and ambitions for her family. Anna’s oldest daughter Anne, at the age of 17, had left the Presbyterian church of her parents and become a Catholic nun! Thus, Anna was not happy to learn of her youngest daughter’s state of mind. Soon after being summoned to come to her mother at Inveraray, Henriette was married off to the baronet of Auchinbreck, actually betrothed. She was married about a year later, in early 1674 when she had likely just turned 18.. .
As to when that happened, here are some facts of the family that show the year and time of the year. A precise day and month is not yet available. Having most likely been born in 1656, based on her mother’s accounts of what she was doing and when, and her husband’s declining health from the winter of 1654-5 on, Henriette was 18, and of age by Scottish law at the time, when she married Duncan Campbell, 4th baronet of Auchinbreck in the summer of 1674.
In October, 1674, the 9th Earl of Argyll, made a settlement of “jointure” upon his second wife, Anna McKenzie-Lindsay, widow of the 1st Earl of Balcarres. The property given to Anna for her own use was the “town house,” at the edge of Stirling which had become known as “Argyll’s Lodging.” At that time, she set aside suites of apartments for herself and her husband, his oldest son, his oldest daughter, and her daughter, Sophia. It is significant to note that there were no apartments set aside for Henriette in October, 1674, though she visited her mother and sister there in the winter of 1674-5, briefly. She was already married. She married in the summer of 1674 and her son, according to her own journal was born prematurely, and unexpectedly on January 30, of the year following her marriage in Edinburgh, that is 1675. She and her husband Duncan had made a trip to Edinburgh before she was to have had her confinement and the baby came unexpectedly, a hard birth leaving Henriette ill for many weeks afterward and unable to have more children.
Additionally, the two ladies, Henriette and her mother, Anna, mentioned the visiting Reverend Cameron having come to Argyllshire and whom they heard preach the summer that Henrietta took her infant son with her and her husband to visit the Earl of Argyll and his wife. From the journal extracts in Ladies of the Covenant, by Rev. Anderson, “In July (of the year her son was born) she went to Kintyre with Duncan and their son, with most of the Earl of Argyll’s and her mother’s family, forming a numerous company...” and met with “Keith” and heard the Rev. Cameron give sermons. She then noted that “soon after, both of these most prominent ones were taken from them,” and no more to be seen in their lands. From the papers about the Covenanters in the Wodrow Collection in the National Library of Scotland and cited in several volumes of biographies and history of the Covenanters, Rev. Richard Cameron had been this prominent and fiery Covenanter minister in Argyll, and Keith, was George Keith the younger brother of the Earl Marischal who did not inherit much land and was chronically in debt. George Keith had been “turned” from the Covenanters by Charles II’s men in exchange for payment of his debts some time in the 1670's, long before 1679. Richard Cameron however was in Fife-shire in the summer of 1675, when the king’s order against “intercomuning” with him was read on 6th of July, 1675, prohibiting all Scots from giving him any further attention or in any way any support, including food, clothing or lodging on pain of loss of their own estates and lives. Charles II declared him “outlaw” and, by this order, made “outlaw” anyone who supported him. Cameron fled to France soon afterward. By January 1676, Cameron was writing friends and relatives from France, assuring them he had safely arrived, but lamenting that his work in Scotland could not be completed. He had left Scotland in 1675.
The last time Rev. Cameron had been in western Scotland had been probably the winter of 1674-5, when the first crackdown on the Covenanters began and Blackadder’s son was arrested and gaoled without trial. His father was the preacher, not himself, but just being a relative of a preacher, who would not be silent, was enough for an arrest by those who hoped the pressure would silence the father. As a result of the crackdown on the Covenanters and arrests that began in the winter of 1674-5, the last time Henriette Lindsay-Campbell could have seen Cameron “in the summer” was in 1674. (Ladies of the Covenant, by. Rev. James Anderson citing the diaries and notes of Henrietta and her mother in their two chapters, was published in 1853 by Blackie and Sons, Glasgow, Scotland and found on-line; additionally, The Covenanters, by John Hewison, in two volumes, using papers from the Wodrow Collections. Both were found on-line and links to both are under “sources” in this AmeriCeltic website, also.)
Before their father, Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck schemed with Bonnie Prince Charlie, his sons, Gilbert and two younger brothers, William and Alexander, who were not going to inherit much anyway, due to the laws of primogeniture, had left for North America. Only one, Gilbert, is known to have gone to Virginia. Two younger brothers, William and Alexander might have ended up in Jamaica, an island in the Caribbean. One definitely did, the other is still in doubt, the subject of another, yet unsubstantiated, story about his end. After slavery ended in the Caribbean, many persons in Jamaica who had sugar and other plantations served by slaves did leave and some descendants of William, and additional cadet lines to Auchinbreck who were known to be in Jamaica also may have left and come to the U.S. in the 1800's. There were Campbells who arrived in the U.S. from the Caribbean, and passed through the southern states after 1818.
The End of the First Line of Baronets of Auchinbreck (period of time 1715-1783): Why Rebellions? Why Emigration?
It should be explained at this point that most Scots nobles and lairds did participate to one degree or another in the Rebellion of 1715, with good cause. There are several histories, now on-line, about the Act of Union and how it was done. For U.S. readers, a good comparison is a shotgun marriage in the Southern U.S.. It was, in legal terms, “an agreement forced upon the Scots under duress,” a term used by the highest jurists, to describe a contract/agreement of a type, which our own Supreme Court declared illegal about 100 years ago in a landmark decision. The Crown, Queen Anne at the time, and the English parliament were ready and willing to send in the English army to force acceptance of their last offer of terms and said so.
These terms not only eliminated the Scottish parliament but reduced the votes of the entire nation to a number of seats in the new “United Kingdom Parliament”, fewer than those of Cornwall in England, a not very populated part of England known for wild weather and not much arable land. There were literally fewer Scottish M.P. seats in the new “union” parliament, than seats allotted to Cornwall, despite the fact that at the time, Scotland still had a population of 30 to 40% of that of England, not counting Wales, depending on the wildly varying estimates of the populations of each land.
The plantations in Ulster, Ireland, were also settled mostly by Scots, quite deliberately under the direct urging of the Stuart kings, had many ties to Scotland but were completely excluded in this act of “unification.” There is a more consistent number for this group of Scots of between 200,000 and 250,000. They lost both trading and political rights. In 1705 or so, the Scots in Scotland, depending on which post 1750 English estimate you care to believe, had between 1.1 and 1.6 million people. The English combined with the Welsh were 4.9 to 5.2 million, best recent estimates. The new United Kingdom Parliament had over 100 members and only 4 of these were allotted to Scotland and NONE to Ulster. All the rest were allotted to Englishmen in England and Wales, most of the larger holdings in Wales by this time being held by Englishmen, also. The new Parliament was virtually completely English. The new king was a German who spoke almost no English, much less lowland Scots or Erse (Scots Gaelic).
Worse, at the same time of the Act of Union, the (Religious mostly) Penal Laws were enacted that not only denied rights to Catholics, but also Presbyterians, in Ireland, depriving most Ulster Scots of nearly all legal rights and opportunities.
To counter this situation, more and more Scots nobles bought lands in England, married English wives and became more English, and in so doing, often neglected their lands in Scotland. Between 1680 and 1730, there were almost 900 christenings, marriages and burials of Campbells, whose families had all once been Scottish, in the city of Westminster (now part of London) alone. The Campbells of Cawdor went to Pembrokeshire in 1698, had a mansion in London besides, and stayed in Pembrokeshire or London until after WWII, as a case in point. They are often called “the English Campbells” to this day.
The foregoing explains how the 1830's famine in Scotland was neglected. This was the first potato famine in the isles, and it was ignored until Rev. McLeod personally brought it to the attention of the now, mostly Anglicized, Scots nobility, most of whom hadn’t set foot in Scotland in some years. This was also how the kings did not become aware of how much emigration took place after 1745, and then again, after the period of the “Highland Clearances,” (roughly the late 1700's to 1854, with the highest period of depopulation being between 1815 and 1850) when these same Anglicized nobles, and those who wished to emulate them, decided sheep were more profitable than vegetable and grain growing human tenants. Human tenants, if they had poor weather and depleted soil, might be in need of help from the lairds and nobles, rather than supporting them. Too many sheep for poor weather and crops could be slaughtered. Sheep ate grass and lower quality grains, not meat, nor did they need vegetables and fruit, and they didn’t need clothing, housing, education, or medical attention when ill.
When Queen Victoria needed troops for the Crimean War, and expected several regiments from Scotland, she found virtually none could be raised. “Let the Queen put uniforms on the sheep and teach them to use rifles” one wag reportedly said. Then the full impact of enormous emigration under the Act of Union became fully understood and the Crown and Parliament began to encourage reversal of some policies and a small increase in members of Parliament. Scotland to this day, in the 21st century, has only about the size of population as England and Wales did together, at the end of the 1600's. The population of England and Wales together, today, is ten times that of Scotland.
The only benefit of the Act of Union to the Scots was that their ports, in Scotland, that is, not Ulster, had the same full trade status that English ports did, and Scottish merchandise was no longer limited to sale within the UK. Some degree of manufacturing industry could be established for the Scots being forced off the rural lands in favor of sheep, if they could not afford to emigrate on their own, and their lairds or nobles would not pay for emigration. However the Scots in Ulster were left totally out of the deal: no representation in a UK Parliament, and no equal status for ports–and Scots Presbyterians in Ulster could not hold office, nor be educated in colleges for professions, and had difficulty retaining owned lands. They were suddenly not much better off than the Catholics..
All the Scots kinsmen in Ulster, who had done as the Scottish-English Stuart kings urged, to modernize (in agriculture and textiles, at least) and Protestantize northern Ireland were not given any rights whatsoever; no place in the Union parliament, no equal trading rights for their ports. Additionally, the English landlords were allowed to abrogate previous agreements with the Crown and stop selling plantation grant lands and instead raise the rack rents–by multiples. This was followed by a famine which was, again, not addressed by the UK under the dying Queen Anne and hard-hearted English parliament. Between the abrogation of the previous agreements for selling and leasing plantation lands and raising rents tremendously, the lack of competitive ports for Scots-Irish fabrics of wool and linen, lower the income of the weavers and growers and the famine, the economy in Ulster collapsed beginning in 1716 and more than half of the Ulster Scots at the time, left Ulster for North America by 1730. The Wallace business interests would have also suffered as they had quays on ports in Ireland whose trade was now greatly restricted..
It is estimated that about a quarter of a million, Ulster Scots, and some Irish and Scots from adjacent counties, left Ireland for the U.S. between 1707 and 1730, over about two generations. Additionally, many Scots from Scotland left at this time. By 1775, over 40% of the entire population of the 13 colonies that were to rebel was Scots, Scots-Irish and Irish. Another significant portion was from the borderland of England and Scotland that had been claimed, and often ruled, by Scots until 1513. Many Scots families had branches in Cumbria, Northumberland and points southward. The Bruce family, the Elliots, Armstrongs, and Woods are a few such examples.
Just before the first famine of 1717, the English had also set up new land inheritance laws in 1708 for most Irish. These laws barred them from owning land, if they were Catholic, and required them to keep dividing lands into smaller and smaller pieces among all children. This was contrary to the laws and rules of primogeniture, that the English and Scots were following, even in Ireland. The smaller and smaller plots of land allotted to Irish families led to the potato becoming the main sustenance for Ireland, as a higher yield and more nutritious crop than grain. However, it was a poor quality of potato that became the standard and it did not stand up to excess ground moisture, changing climate and a blight. Thus, the first famine, in part, lead to the second large famine, when the mono-culture failed, from changes in weather, the ending of the “little ice age.” Then Queen Anne choose as her successor, a distant kinsman, George of Hanover in Germany, bypassing any other closer Stuart descendants. She decided against her half brother, James Francis Edward Stuart, James II/VII’s son, in large measure because he was a fervent Catholic, and he had already stated he would not change his religion.
James II’s son, called “the Pretender” in English history books, was damned at birth for being the son of James II’s Catholic second wife, Mary of Modena. Later, as an adult, he was, by many accounts, a serious, generally reasonable man, and well educated, but he was by his own choice at this time, stubbornly Catholic. He also was no general.
It’s understandable that the English Parliament was fed up with the main line of Stuarts that had twice plunged the double kingdoms of Scotland and England into civil war with the Stuart kings unwillingness, generally, to cooperate and share power with Parliament, and repeated favoritism toward Catholicism. These very same situations had financially almost ruined England during the Plantagenet dynasty, and caused distress to the first Tudor king and civil war for the first Tudor king’s grandchildren at times. But England was not Scotland, and the Stewarts/Stuarts, for all their faults, still had much popularity, in Scotland, in part through the heavy intermarriage of the Stuarts/Stewarts, with all the leading clans of Scotland, and generosity in land grants through those marriages. Too many of the members of the Scottish parliament were literally the kings’ own rather close kinsmen. The earlier Stuart kings, also, had not been strictly monogamous, and had a number of illegitimate children whom they treated very well, in addition to their legitimate children. It was no shame for an early laird of Auchinbreck to be a grandson, or great grandson, of Robert III, king of Scotland through an illegitimate son of Robert’s. The prominent earls of Moray and Albany were originally both illegitimate sons of Stuart kings.
By 1715, the political and economic harm of the Act of Union and the new German king to the Scots was abundantly clear. It all became too much for many reasonable loyal Scots, high and low. In 1715, the Earl of Mar called for rebellion and restoration of the Stuarts, at least in Scotland, and nearly 3/4 of Scotland took up arms for the cause.
James III/VIII called “The Pretender” in English history, was a serious, bookish man, but not a good general and not a great risk-taker. He rather resembled the Roman general nicknamed “the Old Delayer” who met with disaster–and James, likewise, was defeated largely by his own errors, particularly in delays, and a lack of confidence in the poorly dressed and equipped motley Scottish army that gathered on his behalf. They didn’t even have cannon, which King George’s man, the Campbell Duke of Argyll, did. After that, rebellion was really impractical and futile, and most Scots realized this. This, combined with events in Ulster, is when Scottish emigration to the Americas began in earnest.
Why Couldn’t the Scots, Alone, Defeat the English in 1715 or in 1745?
The armies of Scots had been raised by clans with whatever technologies the clans themselves could afford. The clans themselves were split. They did not keep up in either technology, or quantities of arms and ammunition, with England’s increasingly national armies, as the English kings and Parliament gradually reduced the power of English nobles and their extended families.
Scotland also had even more religious warfare than the English and more warfare over the deposition of James II. In 1685, the 9th Earl of Argyll combined the Monmouth rebellion to make Duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles II, king instead of Charles’ Catholic brother James, and to win at least equal rights for the Presbyterian Church in Scotland to operate freely, or make it the main Church of Scotland, in place of the Scottish Episcopal Church.
The 9th Earl of Argyll was not much better at conspiracy than Bonnie Prince Charlie and the baronet of Auchinbreck, and no better a general than “the Old Pretender.” The Scottish part of the rebellion was over in weeks and the 9th Earl of Argyll was captured and beheaded in Edinburgh on June 30, 1685. His oldest son had to petition for restoration of the Argyll estates later. Auchinbreck, as the colonel to Argyll, also lost his estates between 1685 and 1689, and so did any other great families who had supported them. The Earl of Atholl and his allied families ran roughshod over a large part of western Scotland, pillaging, burning, destroying. Then in 1689, the tide turned.
In 1689, it was the turn of the House of Argyll, Auchinbreck and others to do the same to Atholl, McLeod and others as had been done to the Campbells. Many Scots still had supported the Stuarts, even after the English Parliament formally invited James II’s son-in-law, William of Orange to replace James II. So, civil war ensued in Scotland and Ireland. By the end of it all, even with William restoring estates ordered forfeit by James II, and eventually forgiving, to a large extent, the families who had supported James II, the major clans and branches of clans were financially and economically devastated. There wasn’t much excess income for a long time to rebuild and equip with modern and plentiful materiel the clan armies and there was no national army.
The Covenanter related warfare and the Williamite War also resulted in Scots and Ulster Scots fleeing to North America starting in 1670 and continuing until the early 1690’s. Some were transported by the Stuart kings to Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia and the Caribbean. Others had simply fled the fighting and threatened arrests. Some of the latter returned after James II was deposed and William of Orange became king, but not all did. A settlement of Scots and Ulster Scots Presbyterians on the eastern shore of Maryland became large enough by 1685 to have its first permanently assigned minister, a Rev. Mackenzie in 1685.
Between 1707 and 1715, there was no Scottish parliament any longer to muster the whole of the country and create a national army. Thus the rebellion in 1715 was a collection of clan armies, arguing leaders and units that had never fought alongside one another–and all more poorly equipped than their English adversaries. However, a few of the clans did have some artillery.
Between 1715 and 1719, the “Little Rising” that culminated in the Scots loss at Glenshiel, the situation worsened for the clans, and emigration began exploding. Fewer Scots supported this rebellion and the king was less forgiving, especially since the leaders had conspired with Spain who had declared war on England in 1718. This rising was lead, in part, by the McKenzie Earl of Seaforth, a kinsman to the 5th baronet of Auchinbreck by his grandmother, Anna McKenzie, and by his first wife, Janet McLeod who had McKenzie ancestry and whose brother Roderick had married a rather close cousin of Auchinbreck’s own mother, though by this time, Roderick was deceased. Another leader was George Keith, Earl Marischal of Scotland. They conspired with Spain and Spain promised to support them if they rose against England. Spain, under Philip V, did send a few ships and a contingent of Spanish marines to assist them, under Col. Don Nicolas Bolano. Thus a bit over 1,000 Scots and 250 Spanish marines met the English under Major General Joseph Wrightman, at Glenshiel.
In this rebellion the plight of the defeated rebels was made worse by their alliance with Spain and the fact that Spaniards had indeed come to fight along side them. The defeated rebels faced certain execution if captured. After the Earl of Seaforth was badly wounded, the Scots had to retreat and it was clear the battle would go to the English, who had cannon, again. The Scots did not. At Glenshiel, the Spanish under Bolano maintained their position on the hill until the last of the Scots had escaped either to the countryside or the Spanish ships that took them to the Continent, including Spain. Then the Spanish finally surrendered and were imprisoned at Inverness until they were finally repatriated back to Spain. This is precisely when James Campbell, second son of James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck left Scotland and arrived in Spain, making it very likely he was in this rebellion. He is stated in the Lort Inheritance suit by the judges to have both “been in Spain for some 20 years before he died (in Spain) about 1741 or 1744" and “had taken up arms against the United Kingdom at a time when Spain was officially at war with the United Kingdom.” He was judged and proclaimed traitor at the end of this suit.
In 1721, the younger James Campbell’s uncle at law, brother to his step-mother, and 2nd cousin once removed, Sir John Campbell, Thane of Cawdor, was caught sending a letter of support to “the Old Pretender,” as well, and advised to cease and desist if he wanted to become a member of Parliament and retain his lucrative, recently acquired Welsh estates. John took the advice and became a member of Parliament representing Pembrokeshire commencing in 1727, and served for decades, on and off until 1768. (“Parliamentary History of John Campbell of Cawdor and Pembrokeshire,” found on-line.)
By 1745, the population of Scotland and Ulster had plummeted. Even the Scottish-English borderlands lost large amounts of population. The incomes of the Scots lords and clan chiefs had declined greatly. Within less than 20 years, many would be bankrupt and selling off estates, even those who did not participate in the 1745 rebellion. (Source: Alistair Campbell’s, History of Scotland, 2000).
Not only was there no national Scottish army and a downward spiraling population, but there were no longer any great clan armies as well and zero interest from any of the largest branches of large clans in any further rebellion. The 13 lairds and lords, including Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet of Auchinbreck, who sent the ill-considered letter to Cardinal Fleury inviting Bonnie Prince Charlie to try his luck, were hoping for a huge French army and navy, as they had almost nothing to really contribute. If artillery was in short supply in 1715, there was no Scottish artillery to speak of in 1745. On the English side there were far more muskets, and trained troops than among the Scots–and artillery and a navy, all well financed by a Parliament taking in taxes from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and its colonies in the Americas.
The rebellions of Glenshiel (1718) and 1745 which culminated in Culloden, were conceived by romantic, ignorant dreamers. The leaders were nothing less than delusional. The UK had changed, and they had not. Gilbert Campbell of Augusta County, Virginia, his siblings, his numerous cousins on the Kilmory and other lines, and many other younger members of other Campbell families and Scottish families generally understood this. They also understood that when they could not inherit, could not seek political careers, could not be treated fairly and achieve rank as higher officers in the English army, which was another way to build careers to buy lands, then it was time to leave for better opportunities in America.
In North America, although colonial governors were appointed by the UK kings and queens, the colonies were allowed their own legislatures, a kind of system of mini-parliaments. The only big difference was they had no influence on foreign and economic policies including trade, and no real rights to trade with any but the UK ports allowed. However, smuggling ensued and was soon doing so well that a customs officer in Connecticut once complained that his receipts were but a fraction of the value of the contents of the households of just a few of the leading families in his immediate area. Colonial customs officials, if they were born in the colonies, were also often pressured by their peers to “look the other way” at times.
There is a famous incident connected to John Hancock that was partly shown in a recent laughable series called “Sons of Liberty.” The Hancock smuggling incident was one of the few moments of real history and this was discussed by columnists and historians. The issue of taxes became critical to the Crown of the United Kingdom especially after the “Seven Years War,” aka “The French and Indian War.” Several on-line articles noted that this war left the UK over 120 million pounds in debt. The colonial tax collection was very weak. In one article it was noted that “one New England customs official had been paid a salary and expenses amounting to about 8,000 pounds in one year, and only collected about 2,000 pounds in customs fees and duties.” He was also threatened and denied access to ships and warehouses to inspect them.
As a result, after the French and Indian War (aka the Seven Years War), the governors and Crown began appointing customs officials who were not born and raised in the colonies in most areas and tightening their controls to collect more taxes.
Finally, through the Townshend Acts, the Crown insisted on colonial boards to supervise the customs collectors be appointed in London and backed these new boards and officials up with the Royal Navy, all of which also had to be paid for in the colonies. Any disputes over fees and prosecutions, finally, were taken out of the colonial and civil court system and put under the Admiralty Court–military court, directly under the Crown. Introductions to and appointees to the new customs boards were made directly in London. Such civil service appointments were often sought by members of Parliament for younger, landless sons and other close family members, as they carried decent salaries and potential for advancement. John Campbell was serving in the parliament the year the part of the Townshend Acts governing Customs collections and appointments was put firmly under control of the Crown and London.
By the 1750’s, John Campbell’s own oldest son, Pryse Campbell, was also rising in the socio-political scene and became an MP in the UK parliament for Invernessshire. He was made Lord Treasurer in 1766, and then was an MP again for Nairnshire in 1768-69. It is possible his interest and connections to the Treasury, which Customs was to supply may have brought him into contact with the Gilbert Campbell in London who then worked as a clerk in the 1750’s for the Navy regarding tobacco importation and duties. There are certainly suggestions of a relationship though precisely what is not clear. As MP of Invernessshire and heir to Cawdor Castle in Nairn and additional lands, Pryse Campbell would have also spent time in northeastern Scotland and could also have become acquainted with the Gilbert Campbell who became customs controller in Virginia during the time that Pryse was MP of Invernessshire. A Gilbert Campbell was found to have been born in 1728 in Sutherland, near Caithness where others with whom he served in the 1745 rebellion lived. Additionally Campbells were in other nearby northeastern counties, and Pryce’s great-uncle, Archibald Campbell of Clunes had named a son Gilbert. Thus the customs controller could have been from northeastern Scotland and known to the MP for some time before receiving his lucrative and prestigious post on the Potomac River, and several thousands of pounds a year in salary.. It’s important to note, though that according to his biographies, Pryse Campbell did not spend time in Argyllshire and his father had long before sold the lands of the Campbells of Cawdor on Islay and in Argyll, and Pryse himself was at odds with the Duke of Argyll by the late 1750’s.
In the interior of the colonies, the settlers, most of whom were Scots, Scots-Irish, Welsh, Irish and borderlands Scots-English, were learning to take full advantage of the magnificent old growth hardwoods and softwoods and the linseed oil from their flax growing for finishing wood and were building their own furniture and most other household items, and doing quite well at that. While they bought the luxury fabrics made in Europe, such as “masquerade” and “sagathee” (as per a few records in which they and the merchants disagreed about cost and payment and the courts decided the matters), they grew flax and hemp, and raised sheep for wool and meat, and had cattle and deer in the adjacent forests for meat and leather for most everyday attire and a fair amount of home decor. This self-sufficiency accelerated after the passage of the Townshend Acts, led by the Scots, Scots-Irish, et al, and including the Campbells.
Some small deposits of iron, lead and caves with nitre had been found and musket balls, iron goods, and gunpowder could be and were beginning to be made locally. Some manufacturing companies in furniture and a few other products, like paper, was even beginning to be allowed by the Crown, further reducing the need for imports from the English. Paper was being often made from hemp, as well as rope, all grown by the interior colonists. Bricks and pottery, baskets, and even glass were all being made in the interior of the thirteen colonies and in growing towns. Technically, colonists were forbidden to manufacture many products. However there was a large loophole for family production with small scale, local distribution, as happened particularly on the mostly Celtic frontier.
Living in America, particularly Virginia and Pennsylvania, it was almost possible to forget the sad turn of events in Scotland and Ulster-- until the French and Indian War, about which the colonists had no say, and in which they suffered terrible losses of blood and finances. The aftermath was, financially, even more costly, and led to increasing acts of rebellion and finally full-scale revolution.
One of the worst, and most costly set of incidents occurred in one Gilbert Campbell ’s and cousins’ children’s “back garden” so to speak. Gilbert Campbell of Augusta County, had died in more or less peace, peace with his children and community, if not his father, in 1751. Life was good, and the Crown and UK Parliament far away and leaving him and his family and community alone to prosper; Scotland, almost forgotten. Life then started out well for this Gilbert Campbell’s oldest son, James, after his father’s death. He was doing personally well; the community of Forks of the James, which his father had co-founded, was also growing and prospering.
Then in 1754-5, the UK, mostly the English Parliament and German king of the UK, decided to go to war with France, where ever the English and French had competing, neighboring interests, and forgetting just how much control, beyond the English controlled seaboard, France had of the interior of most of North America, and their great trading alliances with the Natives. The blunder by George Washington was just the icing on a half-baked cake.
The Natives generally preferred the French by this time. The French weren’t sending over hordes of colonists, either accidentally or deliberately, to take their lands, and they gave a better deal for the furs the Natives brought them, in contrast to the English. The Scots along the frontier weren’t seen as too bad either, except for their constant encroachment on lands as Natives died from European diseases. By this time, there were many frontier intermarriages of with Native Americans with Scots and northern English (Scots until 1513–and still called Scots by Parliament, as late as 1645), which helped. Unfortunately those Scottish cousins, to the natives, were under the UK government, and when the war required a choice, economics, especially concerns about land, trumped the bit of cousinly blood. The French promised that, if successful, they would strictly enforce a border between white settlers and the natives, and treat the Natives equally, to any European settlers, in law, especially enforcement. The French were more than willing to arm the natives and stand by their sides in conflict in the Americas against any English, any subjects of the UK–and did just that. They were willing to let the Natives keep any prisoners of their combined activities, or those of strictly Natives, especially the daughters of settlers whom the disease-decimated Natives needed to replenish their own tribes, and allowed them to adopt very young sons of massacred fathers, who after a few years would have little if any memory of their UK families. The French essentially created a very large, second, mostly guerrilla, army out of the majority of Native tribes.
The UK had almost no Native allies in this conflict. The Crown and Parliament did not understand what the French had done, and did not send anywhere nearly enough English regulars to protect a thousand mile long frontier, from several thousands of well-armed, and very tough, Natives, well-supported by thousands of French in Canada and the Great Lakes area down to the upper tributaries of the Ohio River. That frontier was already quite well populated by generally peaceful unsuspecting settlers, for many of whom this was their last refuge after too many bitter experiences in Scotland, Ulster, the rest of Ireland and northern England. There had been no major raids or other incursions of hostile Natives since December, 1742, fifteen years before. That ended when the UK and France went to war based on decisions made thousands of miles from that frontier.
Although George Washington bungled his first mission in this war, he was a quick study, and had spent a lot of time on the frontier as a surveyor. He did understand the risks and high potential for disaster of this war. He prevailed upon the Governor and House of Burgesses to be allowed to quickly build 20 forts along the Virginia frontier (the Cherokee in North Carolina were one of the few peoples of Natives that generally did not ally themselves with the French, and were essentially staying neutral), and with agreement of the Pennsylvania authorities into Pennsylvania as well. The county militias, from about two counties eastward, as well as male settlers near the forts were mustered to finish building and man the forts.
The English generals saw this, but, these new arrivals from England and Scotland, did not believe the natives in Pennsylvania and the Ohio River area, and southward, were much of a threat, dismissing the reports of Washington, the Governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia and even the gentlemen who settled along the frontier. The recently arrived UK commanders ordered the fort building to be halted and took most of the men at the forts into units to be marched to New York and then to Canada. Braddock’s defeat was just one of a string of UK bungles by men in red coats marching and fighting in the open, against French and Natives, well-armed and well-organized, who had the sense to lay ambushes and use the trees and boulders that covered the frontier for concealment and protection. Many of those hapless men in the colonial militias also commandeered by the English died along with the totally unaware, fresh off the boats British soldiers, in those ambushes in New York, leaving their families in Virginia, and the families in New York, and Pennsylvania, likewise, without real protection.
When the raids of the Native Americans allied with the French swept into western Pennsylvania and into the heart of the Shenandoah Valley, thousands of families literally packed up and moved to North Carolina where the natives were friendlier and the governor less focused on New York and Canada. There are several good books on the subject of the French and Indian War as it happened in America, for further reading, besides the dozens of on-line articles. Three I own and have read and from which I derived most of the foregoing information are: Crucible of War: the Seven Years War and the Fate of Empire in British North America 1754-1766, by Fred Anderson, 2000; The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities, by Colin G. Calloway in 1995; Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies & Tribes in the Seven Years War in America, by Francis Jennings, 1988. The last may be on line since it might no longer be in print.
As an example of how many people were betrayed by these sometimes arrogant, certainly ignorant commanders and their lords back in London, here is a list of the Campbells, alone, who were in these exposed frontier areas in Virginia in 1755, from Lyman Chalkley’s Chronicles of the Scotch-Irish, 3 volumes, abstract summaries of actual official records of most, but not all of the frontier and adjacent eastward, counties of Virginia. There were 6 John Campbells, 3 William Campbells, 3 Robert Campbells, 3 James Campbells, 3 Alexander Campbells, 2 David Campbells, 2 Patrick Campbells, then Andrew, Archibald, Arthur, Charles, Daniel, Gilbert, George, Malcolm, Moses, Samuel and Thomas Campbell. Most of them had minor children. These families were well established and in their third and fourth generations since the heads of the families had been born and they with adult sons had emigrated. The heads of the families of most of the Campbells were related, to one of only a few of the more prolific and affluent lines. These were lines of Campbells with many family members not enough land to live in Scotland comfortably, or Ireland, and yet had enough money to emigrate. Few of the Campbells began in the Americas in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia or the Carolinas as indentured servants. The Campbells included lines from Ayrshire–Skeldon and Cessnock, Argyllshire, possibly some out of Glenorchy as the 4th baronet, had 27 children of which at least 9 sons lived to adulthood, and a few out of Kilmory, and its cadets which were all cadets to Auchinbreck, and maybe one or two, at the most out of Auchinbreck itself.
A large number of Virginia Campbell lines come from two possible brothers, in particular, who arrived first in Pennsylvania in 1720 (as said by a biography written some 200 years later), and the sons of one of them about a year later. The two oldest arrivals were John, b. 1670 and William, b. abt. 1680, with a third, James, born 1689, who may have been a brother, or son of John. He was definitely related to John, based on his will and estate administration records and marriages of his children. However, the first land records, or Campbells in Chester and Lancaster Counties in Pennsylvania are in the 1730’s. (There will be a separate monograph soon on the records of Campbells in the earliest counties in Pennsylvania, as that seems to be needed.--CFB, April, 2022)
There was also a family of merchants on the coast of Virginia in the very late 1600’s, one son of whom had descendants who are documented as having gone to North Carolina..
It is also important to remember that a few Campbells arrived early enough to settle on the Beverley grant in the mid 1730’s in Virginia, in the northern third of the Shenandoah Valley.. However, this grant was already running out of land to distribute as patents by the time most Campbells arrived in the piedmont, and Shenandoah valley of Virginia. The Borden Grant was created late enough (1737-40) for most of the rest of the Campbells to benefit.
Campbells of Ayrshire also arrived who were most closely related to the Bordens and the surveyor they opportunistically employed, through the same single individual, Magdalena Woods-McDowell-Borden-Bowyer, whose mother was Elizabeth Campbell. The best current and new evidence thus far is that she was of Campbells of Skeldon, a cadet house to Loudon, one of whose founders in Ireland had acquired property in County Meath in the parish neighboring that where one of the two Woods family that intermarried lived. The greatest number of Campbells of Skeldon lived in County Down near the grandfather of Samuel and Michael Woods. This included the second of three brothers from whom both Elizabeth Campbell Woods, wife of Samuel Woods and Mary Campbell Woods, wife of Michael Woods a Hugh Campbell, Esq. (he was a lawyer, besides being a captain in his uncle then cousin’s regiments) The uncle of the three Campbell brothers who arrived in Ireland in 1607 was Sir Hugh Montgomery of Braidstane of Ayrshire, later made Viscount Ards in Ireland (Ards region of mostly County Down, part of the old Clandeboye lands of Con O’Neill.) Elizabeth Campbell’s son Richard Woods was married to Elizabeth Campbell, a daughter of Gilbert Campbell, possibly the landless third son of the 5th baronet Auchinbreck..
How these two Campbell lines came to get together is still a matter of several possible connections through a third family. If that unverified 1734 record in Pennsylvania turns out to exist, then the connection is probably through the Wallace’s and their business activities as well as Andrew, William, Samuel etc. being first cousins to the baron of Craigie after 1661. I still have to delve into that one further. There were several opportunities for them to meet. Rather than lay out all the possibilities, I’ll just keep searching for actual documentation of how and when the introductions were made based on the families who lived near Gilbert or his wife and her family at various times.
In the testimony and depositions of the Borden Inheritance Lawsuit, O.S. HO, N.S. 48, filed in Augusta and Rockbridge County, in late 1799 or early 1800, after the death of Magdalena, is the history of the establishment of this grant and how the surveyor John McDowell, Magdalena’s first husband and she came to first meet the Bordens who upon learning he was a surveyor, contracted him on the spot. The Bordens also told the McDowells of the Governor’s angry stipulation, that 100 families had to be brought in, and settled upon the grant within 2 years, or Benjamin Borden Sr., had to return the grant to the Governor. Mr. Borden had won the grant from the Governor, Earl of Gooch’s son-in-law. The son-in-law was a gambler and a rather poor one, not knowing when to quit. Benjamin Borden was a wealthy merchant from Pennsylvania, and occasionally gambled with men whom he saw of potential use, and about whom he wished to learn more, as was common in politics and business in those days, in the upper echelons of both. Social gambling was a pastime of the wealthy. On a visit to Virginia and while gambling, Benjamin Borden won the grant from the son-in-law of the Governor and Earl of Gooch. The governor was furious and set conditions that he hoped Benjamin Borden could not, or would not, meet, and be forced to either sell the grant back to someone the Governor preferred, at a discount, or return it to the Governor. The Governor had the right of first refusal. The requirement to settle 100 families within only two years, was one of those conditions. John McDowell and his wife, told the Bordens they could easily provide enough settlers, from their own extended families by blood and marriage, back in Pennsylvania, and did just that.
The Scotch Irish had run into religious, ethnic and social, discrimination in Pennsylvania from the English Quakers that founded and largely still dominated the colony. This is particularly documented in the 1880's History of Lancaster County, and several histories of the churches in Pennsylvania. The principal form of discrimination occurred in land sales and patents, even by the colonial officials of the Penn family. The Scots-Irish and Presbyterian Scots would arrive, and it was clear to the officials and the local already established community that they had money to spend, but were different in behavior, language, religious attitudes and practices. Some complaints from their Quaker and Episcopal neighbors were, the women were not submissive enough, exposed too much skin at neck and ankle, and the children were allowed to run wild and be impolite. The men spoke too freely about almost everything, questioned and challenged too much, and if they were Presbyterians, as many were, their loyalty to the official Church of England and Scotland and the Crown were constantly in doubt.
Thus, in Pennsylvania, the Scots and Scots-Irish were pushed as far from civilized loyal society to the frontier with the Natives, as possible. For Pennsylvania and New York, the Natives were the very dangerous, easily provoked to violence and war, Iroquois. Even then, in Pennsylvania, the Scots and Scots-Irish were only given the selection of the poorer quality lands in those areas, and less acreage for their families at that. Then, the Scotch-Irish families would apply for patents and end up waiting years for them to be granted, paying rent and taxes the entire time. The rent, of course, was not transferable to the purchase, either. While waiting, these lands in limbo could not be securely passed on to or divided among children, or resold, without extra bureaucracy, fees, and investigations. Most of the Campbells, and their Woods and Wallace’s kin, ended up in this land-limbo, next to the dangerous Iroquois, and were already looking for opportunities elsewhere when the Borden grant became serendipitously available. This was why the McDowells were traveling through the Shenandoah Valley, at the same time the Borden’s, father and sons just happened to finally visit their grant to decide to either fulfill the terms or sell it. The Bordens saw the campfire of John McDowell and his in-laws and decided to join its comfort and talk.
Thus, the first 100 families on the Borden Grant, including all the Campbells, were all family, related by blood and marriage to one another. This was stated so in court depositions by eye-witnesses, relatives of the deceased John McDowell, Benjamin Borden Jr. and Magdalena Woods, deceased widow to both, who still lived at that time (1800-1809 when the suit(s) progressed and were finally settled). Bear in mind it wasn’t just McDowells and the Woods, and their immediate in-laws we are discussing, but the in-laws, themselves, were also bringing in their own in-laws into the settlement. It was a huge extended family of several degrees of relationships of blood and marriage.
Some of the Earliest Campbell lines and Wills in Augusta County, VA:
By 1756 several of the oldest and earliest Campbell settlers had died leaving grown children. The earliest adult William Campbell died in 1745, leaving a wife, “Maryan” (Marian), and Patrick Campbell, Sr., was named executor of his will and estate and assigned his bond and duties to a John Campbell in 1747. In 1748 a John Campbell died, leaving grown children. In 1756, the son of this first John Campbell, another John Campbell, died, leaving only one minor child, son John; the rest were grown. So the first John Campbell was VERY old, probably about 70 or so; his son John Jr. was about 50. This is all from Chalkleys Chronicles of the Scotch-Irish, which can be found on-line through genweb county sites in Virginia, usually under “archives” and “sources.”
Another early Campbell settler, William Campbell, wrote his will in 1754, which was proved, upon his death in 1759. He had a few grandchildren by the time he died. He was probably in his 70's when he died in 1759. His oldest surviving son, Samuel, was executor. This William, by the way, may have been a brother to Elizabeth Campbell Woods whose husband was SAMUEL Woods. William Campbell was among three Campbells who lived near Samuel Woods and his wife when they were members of the same church near what is now Harrisburg in Pennsylvania (church records and tax records sent from the Lancaster County Historical Society to the late Ruth Lamar Petracek and cited in her book, Woods-Wallace Cousin Clues, 1978, and the tax records themselves as found on-line, and Chalkley’s Chronicles... regarding the William Campbell will, etc.) Other sons named in the will were, CHARLES (a name that will be more significant later), James and John. John was the youngest. Elizabeth Campbell married Samuel Woods, about 1705 or a little before, and the name Samuel was very rare in the Campbell lines at the time of her marriage and even a generation later.
The oldest James Campbell will was written in 1753, and proved after his death in 1754. In that will, James stated he was “about 71 years of age,” at the time he was writing. This means he was born in 1689. This James Campbell had married twice, and both wives were deceased. His youngest son, Daniel, was not quite of age, but James had grandchildren by all of his older children. This James was related to John Campbell born “about 1670" and who his biographers had claimed had emigrated with several sons, and his sister Mary, in 1720, first settling in what became Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Mary had married Moses White. Moses White’s son Isaac White, married one of James Campbell’s daughters, thus marrying a Campbell cousin, and lived near James. Even many members of the White family in this area were also Campbell descendants–twice, by the mid 1700's.
By 1756, almost all of these hundreds of Campbells, and descendants of female Campbells, were out of cadet houses to Loudon, Auchinbreck-Kilmory, and others, were left by the newly arrived English commanders to the less than tender mercies of the many thousands of brutal, Native allies of the French, including some of those Iroquois whom they had thought to leave behind to Pennsylvania. After the unexpected incident of December, 1742, the Iroquois had been told by both the Virginia and Pennsylvania governors to stay out of Virginia, and for 17 years had done so. In 1755, the Iroquois themselves were split in this war, and some of them were willing to return to Virginia for raids, booty and prisoners, and did. The irony is that the very person who deprived the 20 forts Washington had built to protect the Shenandoah and Piedmont Scots-Irish, and all those Campbells was himself a Campbell and kinsman to several families who were hit hard in this war. He was none other than John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudon, about a fourth cousin or so to Elizabeth and Mary Campbell of the Campbells of Skeldon who had married Samuel and Michael Woods. Skeldon was a cadet house to Loudon. The Earl of Loudon became both Commander in chief of the British forces in North America and Governor of Virginia in 1756 and even in the assessment of the UK did poorly with both. With undermanned forts to protect the Virginians and unfortified small towns in the valley and piedmont along well-traveled roads, the Campbells and their kin were almost sitting ducks.
The native allies of the French, in about a month’s time, took full advantage of the utter stupidity of the English commanders of the war effort in America, and destroyed all 20 forts, massacring most adult men, many older women and taking the rest prisoner. This included a few dozen men, women and children in Campbell related families–more than there were of McDonalds’ at Glencoe. There was not one UK subject left in the entire area of all 20 forts. The border moved eastward about 100 miles in under a month. There was not one English regular sent to investigate or replace this loss of the combined commandeered men from the forts and the massacred smaller groups of militia who had, on their own, gone to relieve and rescue the forts as they were attacked . The entire Shenandoah valley and western Piedmont east of the valley were left wide open to the Natives and attack they did. They even attacked funeral parties burying the dead from previous raids, all the way to the Forks of the James and eastward. (Chalkley’s Chronicles... and some family histories have several eye-witness accounts of attacks on even parties sent to collect or bury the dead from the previous raids.)
Worse, the English Parliament had sent little in the way of perishable supplies, expecting its regular troops to be supported, fed and housed in particular, by the very people they were betraying to the French and Natives in their primary English goal of gaining control of the Great Lakes, and Canada. Virginia and Pennsylvania were the primary agricultural colonies of the entire thirteen, and the Piedmont and Shenandoah valley in Virginia, one of the premier areas of all. They could and did get three crops a year out of these areas. Not even the best land in England could do that. So, besides providing their own protection in a war they did not want and had no vote in starting, the families of the Virginia frontier, including many Campbells and their nearest and dearest kin by blood and marriage, were also all supposed to feed the very army that was abandoning them, or being forced to abandon them.
Thus, many hundreds of Virginia families, at this time fled to North Carolina, settling the Piedmont and “New River” and Watauga River areas, there. This means they were also abandoning tens of thousands of established farmlands, taxable farmlands, farmlands that were to have fed the English regulars and the hapless militias pulled away from protecting their families. Moving to North Carolina, they had to clear lands all over again and they would not yield well for years. The North Carolina governor and Assembly welcomed them. The new Virginia governor fumed and wrote letter after letter to the king, Parliament and the English generals in New York, to undo what Loudon had done and what continued to be done by the new military leadership, but to no avail.
As just one example of what happened to Campbells and their kin from Campbell females look at the Fort Upper Tract Massacre, written about a few times in historical magazines. Captain William Woods, was a grandson of the Irish Campbells of Skeldon family, through his mother, Elizabeth Campbell Woods. He had taken part of his family and a small relief column of militia to Fort Upper Tract, and Captain William Woods was among those massacred,–scalped and mutilated, after being slaughtered mostly with tomahawks. His wife, Martha Drake-Woods and two teenage daughters were made captive of the Natives. His wife and one daughter was eventually released and returned to the families of the Shenandoah valley. One daughter was never returned. More than 20 persons were killed at just this one fort. Twenty of them fell in this manner. (“The Fort Upper Tract (West) Virginia Massacre, April 27, 1758, p556, Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine.)
Between the disastrous rebellions in Scotland that ruined so many Campbells and Lord Loudon’s poor performance in the French and Indian war, causing great losses in Virginia, it probably should not be a surprise to researchers that the Campbells in Virginia were happy to admit and preserve their Scottish culture generally, but only generally. By 1775 they were willing to chuck out the entirety of the UK rule, and not to admit to who their families were closest among the lairds, baronets or anything higher in Scotland. None of them had done any real good for their Virginian American “cousins.”
The kings, George II and grandson George III, the politicians in London and the commanders, used to continental warfare in civilized nations of cultivated forests and gardens, bungled most of their efforts in North America, and wasted the lives of thousands of English regulars and colonial militia alike and caused the deaths and displacement of thousands of civilians on the frontier. These leaders generally did not suffer the losses those beneath them, and those who lived on the frontiers, had. In the eyes of the colonies whose frontiers were ruined and economies severely disrupted, despite generally winning the war after seven years, mostly as a result of efforts in other parts of the world, Parliament then had the sheer unmitigated gall to tax the colonies, including Virginia, who had suffered the most, for the costs of the bungled warfare the UK had conducted in the thirteen colonies, and Canada. This, more than any other event, was the powder keg for the U.S. Revolution. It was no accident that the Declaration of Independence was written by a Virginian who was born and lived in Albemarle County, one of those counties that suffered depredations after the loss of the 20 forts, and whose mother was of Scots ancestry. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were personally acquainted with the Campbells of Augusta and Albemarle County and their numerous other kin.
The English parliament continued to mistreat the North American colonies, especially Virginia and Massachusetts. The last straw for the Virginians was an incident called “Lord Dunmore’s War” for the last colonial governor of Virginia, who afterward was sent packing by angry militia and fled the colonies. The Townshend Acts of 1767-8 had provoked riots and civil and uncivil disobedience up and down the 13 colonies, but particularly New England.
The young king, George III, and his old prime minister, Lord North, were angry and thought to teach the colonists a lesson by disarming them and blocking westward expansion, and giving greater support to the Native Americans. This was the purpose of several new resolutions of Parliament under Lord North. Following up on Lord North’s Resolution enacted by the English Parliament in May, 1774, Dunmore had initially armed both the Shawnee and the Virginia militia and set them upon each other, not telling the militia that he had sent arms and encouragement to the Shawnee, in fact, had even met with Shawnee leaders during his tour of Ft. Pitt, which he renamed Ft. Dunmore. Dunmore then sent the Shawnee more guns, and did not send reinforcements of any kind to the militia. He, and Lord North had literally hoped the restive frontier militia, chafing over all the increasing taxes to pay for English wars and English limitations on their trade and manufacturing economy, and the Shawnee would kill so many of each other, neither would be a threat to Royal enforcement of other English predilections, including the increased customs duties collections. This ploy completely failed, and did exactly what the great Parliamentarian Pitt feared and stated–in Parliament--would happen if North’s Resolution passed. It incited greater rebellion.
The frontier Virginia militias were as well-schooled, by this time, in guerrilla fighting, as much as the Shawnee themselves, among the foremost of the English allies at this time. The Virginia militias were better organized than their native adversaries and ultimately, even without additional help from Dunmore, had more resources. The Virginia militia defeated the Natives, soundly, at the Battle of Point Pleasant, in 1774, discovered all the new English arms among them, and heard from leaders of the captured Shawnee how Dunmore, eagerly acting under Lord North’s Resolution which had passed Parliament, had indeed, double-crossed them. Shawnee who escaped, sent Dunmore a message telling what happened and how his plot had been discovered. Dunmore ordered Col. Lewis to stand down and disband the militias. Lewis refused and marched them eastward to report directly to the Virginia House of Burgesses and confront Dunmore. Dunmore left the county immediately, fearing for his life. Dunmore was not to be replaced by any more English appointees, ever again. Within a year, the Virginia House of Burgesses replaced him with Richard Henry Lee, who was recalled from the 2nd Continental Congress, but not before placing his famous Resolution for Independence on the floor of the Congress for debate in June of 1776. The Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence the following month, July 2, 1776 and was ratified on July 4, 1776.
This wasn’t the first time that an English appointed governor had double-crossed the Virginians in warfare with the Natives. The last very similar disaster had occurred in the 1670's, under Governor Berkeley, who had both allowed arms to be sold to the natives and refused the entreaties of the colonists in Virginia to call up the militias to defend the settlements when said Natives began to use those arms en masse on the settlers, instead of game. This resulted in Bacon’s Rebellion, which Berkeley then put down harshly–as he had not so treated the warring natives. King Charles II, responding to letters of the colonists, just before they’d desperately gone into rebellion, sent commissioners to investigate, and found that, although he did not like the rebellion, he did understand the justifications and blamed Berkeley for both the native depredations and the rebellion and essentially accused him of mishandling all the events and exceeding his authority in hanging the leaders and not sending them to London for trial. Berkeley was eventually recalled and replaced.
If Parliament was justified, through its hundred years of history with the Stuarts, in ejecting the Stuarts, then by the same reasoning, Virginia was justified in getting rid of the English Parliament and the Crown appointed governors, and that is indeed, how some Virginians saw the two histories. That is precisely why certain clauses about the “king, his governors and favored advisers having made war on the colonists through the Natives” are in the Declaration of Independence.
The Battle of Point Pleasant, in 1774, as a result, in a Declaration by Congress February 17, 1908, was called the first official battle of the American Revolution. At least Campbells were in Lewis’ force. The die was cast, and Campbells were in rebellion against the English dominated UK, yet again. This time they would win, but lose, forever, their last ties to Scotland. Two of the most famous Virginian generals were William and Arthur Campbell., possibly descendants of the third laird of Auchinbreck through a cadet house to the cadet of Kilmory, or possibly descendants of an illegitimate son of the 2nd baronet. More on this particular guessing game is later in this monograph. Additional officers included descendants of Gilbert Campbell, possible son of the 5th baronet, and from Campbell of Skeldon. (History of Battle of Point Pleasant is from “Battle of Point Pleasant,” Point Pleasant Monument Commission, Fourth Edition,1976) (Reams of detail about the services of Generals William and Arthur Campbell have been published, many of which are now on-line. They were covered in several books on the turning point battle of King’s Mountain in North Carolina, as they commanded the Patriot forces in that event.)
Here is just a partial list, from the official muster rolls of Col. Andrew Lewis and his captains, of just some of the exasperated Campbells and their kin who served under Lewis at Point Pleasant, against the Shawnee, and whom Lords North and Dunmore would have had the Shawnee slaughter as cruelly as Capt Woods and so many others had been massacred at the twenty forts not even 20 years earlier. Those who were Campbells, Woods, Whites, Wallaces and Hays: Campbell: Arthur, Capt. John, Joseph, Robert, Samuel, Capt. William (later General); Charles Hays; Wallace: Ensign Adam, Andrew, David, Robert and Lt. Samuel (later Col., another of his brothers, John, not listed at the battle was described in other sources as a ranger-scout for Lewis’s forces and provisioner who also gave support by hunting for meat for the forces); Woods: Adam, Andrew, Archibald, Sgt. James, Capt. Michael, Richard; White: David, Joseph, Solomon and William.
Long before all of this, however, the estate and lairdship of Auchinbreck was created, and the first line of the family that later became baronets was established, 20th July, 1435, by charter from Duncan an-Adh “the fortunate” the first Lord Campbell (charter of James II to Duncan an-Adh, naming him “Lord Campbell,” dated 22 June, 1452) to his third son, born of his second wife, Margaret Stewart, Duncan in 1420. The first line of direct descent died out in 1660/1. In 1625, the lairds of Knockamellie, a cadet branch of Auchinbreck was established. In 1660/1, the senior-most male of Knockamellie, the oldest nephew of the 3rd baronet who died in 1660/1, became 4th baronet Auchinbreck creating the second line. The second line of direct descent died out after the 6th baronet in 1814, and it took several years to determine who was the next nearest male relative to any of the baronets, who was also still in Scotland or elsewhere in the British empire. In the early 16th century, Archibald Campbell, the third laird of Auchinbreck and Kilmichael had four sons, the last two were founders of the Kilmory, and Kilberrry and Danna cadet lines. The senior most male of the Kilmory line of descent and who was still within the empire in 1814 when the 6th baronet of Auchinbreck, died finally inherited the title beginning a third line of baronets.
By that time, part of North America had rebelled and established a separate nation as a democratic republic, called the United States of America, and no longer paid obeisance to the kings/queens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, and recognized no titles. The UK in its turn would offer no title in the UK to any person in this rebel nation, regardless of ancestry. Most of the children of the sons of the 5th baronet had gone to what became the United States and the Caribbean island colonies. Those in the U.S. were no longer recognized as heirs to the title and any remaining estates after 1783, and if there were any descendants in Jamaica, still, no one troubled to find those. After all the 5th baronet had twice been found to be a rebel. In 1761, the London courts decided that no child of a rebel who had taken up arms against the UK and then gone on to live in and serve an enemy country, was entitled to any inheritance in the UK. James’ oldest grandson by his first son, Duncan, another James, became 6th baronet before this judgment. After this judgment, the Crown could lawfully bar any descendant from any other son of the 5th baronet from becoming the next (7th) baronet. The Crown may have done exactly that in not searching for descendants of sons of the 5th baronet in Jamaica and, instead, choosing to offer the baronetcy to a line out of Kilmory that was only about 5th cousins to the last baronet.
The second son of the reprobate 5th baronet Auchinbreck, James, had died in Spain, as a traitor, having been at Glenshiel, and leaving no sons who, had they existed, would have been barred as sons of a traitor. It was this James’ own daughter, Mary Philippa, who was barred from any inheritance in the UK in the landmark precedent setting case of 1761, just mentioned, precisely because she “was the daughter of a traitor who had taken up arms against his mother country and served an enemy (Spain).” Her mother had also been found to have committed a number of frauds in even attempting to gain an inheritance to which the girl had no right, even had her father not been a traitor, but that was beside the main point for the judge.
The 7th baronet ended up finally being determined out of a line of Donald Campbell of Kilmory, a younger son of the 3rd laird, two lairds before the first baronet, and that is the line that continues now.
Donald Campbell of Kilmory, the third son of the second laird of Auchinbreck (3rd laird of Auchinbreck and Kilmichael), died in late 1593 or early 1594 and left a will dated 7 November, 1593. His life is fairly well documented. Donald Campbell of Kilmory had as his second son, Duncan Campbell, vicar of Kilinan who had as his oldest son, Dugald Campbell, parson of Letterkenny in County Donegal, Ireland.
Dugald Campbell, Parson of Letterkenny, Ireland, married Annabel Hamilton, daughter of Hamilton of Torrens (Torrence) and had 21 sons and 9 daughters. He lived in Ireland in the early to mid 1600's. Eighteen of his sons died unmarried and without children. Two of his sons, who married, died without legitimate sons. His son George had no legitimate issue. Dugald’s son William had only two surviving daughters. The Letterkenny lands of Dugald then had to go to descendants of his last son, John Campbell of Kildallog (aka Kildaloig) who became Chamberlain of Kintyre, as the next line of male heirs, given the laws of primogeniture inheritance of that day.
John Campbell of Kildallog was married to Elizabeth McNeil, daughter of Lachlan McNeil of Lossit. He is the ancestor of the current line of baronets of Auchinbreck that proceeded from the 7th baronet, a laird of Kildallog. (As per Highland Papers, vol. IV, edited by J.R.N. MacPhaill, R.C., first published in 1934. The compiler of the section in this publication called “Genealogy of the Cadets of the Family of Auchinbreck” stated he had examined original records of the family of the current line of baronets going back to Kilmory, and cited a number of them. However, MacPhaill noted that the two genealogists of the 18th century who worked on the main and cadet lines of Auchinbreck and Kilmory, etc. did not always agree and that he thought both genealogies were “suspect.” Additionally, the Auchinbreck genealogy could not be examined as the red boxes of family and estate records of the 5th baronet Auchinbreck were confiscated when he was arrested for treason in November, 1745–after being closely watched by Crown agents since 1741, and there is no record of the boxes being returned when the baronet, who was not pardoned, was released from imprisonment in Dumbarton to house arrest at Lochgair for the rest of his life.) ) John Campbell of Kildallog had 8 sons who lived to adulthood, though not all married (or were actually “known to have married”--some may have married.). John’s 5th son, Archibald Campbell was Sheriff of Argyll and later succeeded to the lairdship of Danna.
The Danna line was noted as being confused in statements about it and parts of it having disappeared from records in Scotland. They don’t show up in Jamaica, either where other kin of theirs do in the mid and late 1600's . It is believed by some researchers that a number of descendants of the Danna line may have gone to Ireland, including taking up lands at or near Letterkenny, after the two older sons of Dugald Campbell, Parson of Letterkenny died without sons. Believed and proved are two different things. The theory is plausible, but that’s about all that can be said for the present. For over 75 years now, MacPhaill and others have said more research needed to be done on this line. We’ll take a side trip to describe what is known about this line and why it’s a plausible theory that some of this line’s members might have gone to Ireland, besides Danna being a cadet to a cadet line with not a lot of property for inheritance in Scotland.
One reason why Campbells of Danna are believed to have sent a number of descendants to Ireland is found in the first line of Danna. The fourth son of the third laird of Auchinbreck, and younger brother to the above, Donald of Kilmory, was Archibald Campbell named “of Danna.” This older Archibald Campbell of Danna was nicknamed “Gillaspie na Lurich” (of the coat of mail, for many years as a soldier). Archibald served in the Irish wars–the wars of the mid 1500's, in the 1550's, not the 1600's. His oldest son, Donald Campbell of Danna was married to Sorley Boy McDonald’s daughter. Sorley Boy McDonald and the McDonalds under him eventually settled in County Down, Ireland by 1585, having lost the last McDonald lands in Kintyre to the Campbells. (County Down and McDonald family histories found on-line) Archibald’s second son, Calen Mor of Kilberry married Helen Wood of the Wood of Largo (near Perth). This Wood family had members in County Sligo in Ireland before 1600. (County Sligo historical records found on-line.) Apparently Archibald Campbell of Danna’s line failed at some point to have discernible male heirs. Otherwise his older brother’s descendant would not have “succeeded to Danna” about a century or so later.
Another possibility, though, is an heir or two of someone in Archibald’s line might have taken up enough land to create a separate estate in Ireland, rather like two sons of the Campbells of Skeldon did in County Down and then Meath and Dublin. The Campbells of Skeldon appealed to the Lord Lyon to establish their Irish coat of arms as still of Skeldon, originally of Ayrshire. Descendants of Archibald Campbell might not have chosen to do this. In this case, they could have refused Danna and let it pass to a cousin from the descent of Archibald’s older brother of Kilmory. There were Campbells near Letterkenny after the deaths of Dugald, the parson and his older sons. It is not yet established who precisely that later generation in this area was.
Auchinbreck and its cadet houses, in the 16th century, were a prolific bunch and arable land in Scotland was not plentiful. Scotland in the 1500's and 1600's was mostly an agrarian economy with some coastal villages with industries related to the sea and a little mostly light manufacturing elsewhere. There were no large industrial cities; not even large industrial towns. Scotland and England both had inheritance laws that ensure the largest amount of a father’s land went to his oldest son. Scotland was a bit more generous to the younger sons than England but not greatly so. Ireland with its constantly warring kinglets needing mercenaries was long a potential for both English and Scots to perform military service for land. The Irish wars of the 1550's which introduced the Campbells of Danna, a rather junior cadet house of Auchinbreck, to Ireland were only the latest in centuries of such warfare.
Sir Duncan Campbell, 1st Laird of Auchinbreck was born about 1405-10. He received his charter from his father, the Lord of Lochawe later made Lord Campbell, in 1435. There are, according to MacPhaill, two Auchinbrecks and the first, associated with this charter and lands given to him at about this time by his father was at Glendaruel. He died about 1480. He owned Kilmichael in Glassary, which held the bailey courts for the Auchinbreck family even in the 1700's. There also was a small, now in extreme ruins, castle at Auchinbreck. (Campbell trees from Clan Campbell and MacPhaill’s Highland Papers, the latter has notations of documents.)
Sir Dugald Campbell, 2nd Laird of Auchinbreck and Kilmichael, son of the first laird married a daughter of Lamont of that Ilk, and held the title from about 1480 to sometime in the 1500's, possibly in 1513, at the Battle of Flodden Field. He left one known son, Archibald Campbell. The second site of Auchinbreck of Cowall, came into the Campbell family through this marriage from the Lamonts. It is the second site that is where the castle, now in extreme ruins, was located.
Sir Archibald Campbell, 3rd Laird of Auchinbreck and Kilmichael, married a daughter of Campbell of Ardkinglass, about 1535-40. He had four known sons, two of whom became lairds after him: Dugald, 4th Laird; Duncan, 5th Laird; Donald–ancestor of Kilmory Campbells, and Archibald–ancestor of Danna and Kilberry Campbells. The 7th baronet named after 1804, going forward to the present descends from the third son, Donald Campbell of Kilmory.
Sir Dugald Campbell, 4th Laird of Kilmichael, b. ca. 1542, md. Fynewald McDonald, daughter of McDonald of Dunvegan (at that time the McDonalds held the Isle of Skye), and died before 1567, without male heirs, and was succeeded by his next brother, Duncan.
Sir Duncan Campbell, 5th Laird of Auchinbreck and Kilmichael, previously, as second son, Auchinbreck and Castleswene, was already laird in 1567 and served the Earl of Argyll who had secured the guardianship of Mary McLeod, “Heiress of Harris” the only surviving child of William McLeod the clan chief of the McLeods of the Isles who died in 1554, and had by this time taken Harris and Skye and other properties from the McDonalds. These properties included a piece of Argyllshire. All the McLeod lands were originally to have come with the heiress to the Campbells. The guardianship of the wealthy heiress had been granted to Argyll by Mary, Queen of Scots who reigned from 1561-67, before being deposed by her countrymen. Duncan was married to Mary McLeod in 1567 and that set off a war between the McLeods, led by Mary’s dispossessed uncle, Tormod McLeod,, and the Campbells. They fought finally to a standstill some several years later. The Campbells proposed a negotiated settlement that was finally accepted by the McLeods: Mary was to receive, in lieu of most of her property, a dowry of 40,000 marks to be paid to Auchinbreck, and Argyll was to receive the Argyllshire property of the McLeods that had been formerly held by the McDonalds. Additionally, the McLeods swore fealty to the Argylls and protection in adversity for the descendants of Argyll and Auchinbreck. Duncan, 5th Laird Auchinbreck and Kilmichael, and his wife, Mary McLeod, had one known surviving son, Sir Dugald Campbell.
Sir Dugald Campbell, 6th Laird Auchinbreck, Kilmichael, and Castleswene, 1st Baronet Auchinbreck, was born ca. 1568–d. 1641. He succeeded to his father before 28th of January, in 1590. He was knighted by King James VI/I of England and Scotland in 1617, during the King’s only visit to his native country after he’d been crowned king of England. Between 1603 and 1617, Dugald Campbell, had served the Earl of Argyll, who had been the strongest supporting of the King’s council and edicts in Scotland and helped restore order in western Scotland, repressing any resurgences of the McDonalds and McLeans in reasserting any lordships of the Isles and western highlands independent of the Stewart crown. Dugald was knighted for his services under Argyll on behalf of the King. The Campbells had benefited from Stewart largesse under James V and his daughter, Mary, such as the awarding of the Heiress of Harris to the guardianship of Argyll, allowing Argyll to marry off the heiress to his kinsman the Laird of Auchinbreck, Sir Dugald’s father. Aiding James V and his council against the western rebellions, the Campbells of Argyll, and their kin, including Auchinbreck, strengthened the relationships.
In March, 1625, James I/VI died during a bout of fever when his favorite, Buckingham, who had disgraced himself in Spain returned suddenly, ahead of the Spanish ambassador and persuaded James to allow himself to be treated by Buckingham. Buckingham dismissed the king’s two doctors who had seen him through other bouts, and James was given unusual, vile mixtures of Buckingham’s own creation and died soon after–poisoned. In 1628, Buckingham was murdered, after numerous accusations that he killed King James. He had tried to control Charles I, after his father’s death, but Charles had seen Buckingham’s behavior in Spain and knew that it cost him his father’s first choice in a marriage. He distanced himself from Buckingham, and Buckingham was in disgrace well before his death in 1628. This all occurred at the same time that James VI/I had been developing a new scheme for both enriching the Crown and settling more Scots abroad, since the plantations in Ireland were filling up and the Crown grantees in Ireland were being deliberately slow about selling or regranting parts of what the Crown had granted to them to other Scots as the king had originally intended. The death of James VI/I when it occurred proved disastrous to a new colony of whose development, James himself had approved precisely to relieve the burdens of excess population on poor agrarian lands in Scotland. The House of Auchinbreck and its cadet houses were among those directly affected by the king’s plans and the destruction of them by his heir, Charles I.
“The title Baronet, did not receive its present meaning and privileges until the reign of James I/VI of England and Scotland, when the creation of this new dignity was used as a means of supplying the financial requirements of the Crown. Sir Thomas Shirley, of Wiston, is said to have been the author of ‘the devise for making of Baronets;’ he died Oct. 1612, shortly after the institution of the Order, and on 21 Jan. 1615, his son and namesake made a claim on account of his father's services in this respect. Sir Oliver Lambert having reduced the province of Ulster in Ireland, the King, desiring to retain it in subjection and to encourage plantations therein by the English, as well as to recruit his treasury, instituted the hereditary dignity of a Baronet 11-22 May, 1611, to be bestowed on knights and esquires, who were to be ‘ Men of quality, state of living, and good reputation worthy of the same, at the least descended of a grandfather by the father's side that bore arms, and (who) had also a certain yearly revenue in lands of inheritance of possession one thousand pounds per annum de claro, or lands of the old rent, as good in account as one thousand pounds per annum of improved rents, or at the least two parts in three to be divided of lands to the said values in possession, and the other third part in reversion, expectant upon one life only, holding by dower or in jointure.’
The Scottish Order of Knights Baronets originated in the project for the colonization of a part of North America. King James granted a charter of the Barony of New Scotland to Sir William Alexander, afterwards Earl of Stirling, 10 Sept. 1621, and by his request granted a charter of the Barony of Galloway in New Scotland to Sir Robert Gordon of Lochinvar, 8 Nov. following. A proclamation issued by the Scottish Privy Council, dated 30 Nov. 1624, in accordance with a letter from the King, 18 Oct. preceding, announcing the King's resolution to create one hundred baronets, and requested that the intended recipients of the honor should appear before the Council to record their names. The King died 27 March following. Charles I. within three months of his accession confirmed the charters of King James, and also created Sir Robert Gordon,
2nd son of Alexander, Earl of Sutherland, premier Baronet by charter 28 May, 1625, with remainder to his heirs male whomsoever.’” (The foregoing two paragraphs are from The Second Part of the Peerage, Baronetage, and Knightage of the British Empire, for 1882, by Joseph Foster, Westminster, Nichols and Sons, 25 Parliament Street)
James I, knew his Scotsmen had been fishing the Newfoundland banks for cod, for generations, even before Columbus. The storied visits of Sir Henry Sinclair to what later became Canada and the northeastern U.S. in the early 14th century, more than 150 years before Columbus set foot on Caribbean islands, were also well known. Henry VII, the Tudor king had employed Cabot to stake an English claim to part of the “new world,” but the Scots Stuart kings’ claim to a piece of it was older, predating Columbus and Cabot. Like other kings of western Europe, James VI/I did not agree with the Spanish-Portuguese split of these new lands, blessed by the Papacy. He determined to put colonies in the very areas visited by Sir Henry Sinclair (Oak Island, of recent television fame, is part of Nova Scotia, and was confirmed by modern scientific tests of items, and analysis of engineered works and terra-forming found on the island, to have, indeed, been briefly colonized and used by the Templars under Sir Henry Sinclair.– As one example, elaborate water works built by them were found to indeed contain large amounts of coconut fiber–definitely not native to Canada, to keep the water filtered and flowing. The coconut fiber was radio-carbon dated to the time of Henry Sinclair.)
James VI/I also still needed more money for the Crown’s personal use and for military use. He decided to use the model for settling the Ulster plantation, in which plantationers paid for their privileged lands, and some became titled as well, for his intended Nova Scotia. The larger Scots clans, and those with more money than lands, were looking for new lands for their expanding populations during the period of greater peace and improved agriculture under James VI/I. They eagerly bought into the Nova Scotia project. James’ unexpected death interrupted this, and likewise having to deal with Buckingham’s murder of the king, but in 1628, Charles I began to resume his father’s activities regarding Nova Scotia and the appointing of baronets who contributed to the project, and to the king’s own coffers.
Thus, on the 12th or 24th of January, 1628, Sir Dugald Campbell, was made 1st Baronet Auchinbreck, one of the new “Baronets of Nova Scotia,” under King Charles I of England and Scotland. He eagerly began to prepare to send junior members of his prolific house and its cadet houses to Nova Scotia, which actually ran from Canada to part of what is now New York.
Then, the fickle Charles I, who greatly admired Louis XIV, already married to the sister of Louis, decided to thank his brother-in-law for the privilege of being united with Henriette Marie, with a gift–Nova Scotia. The English parliament, at the time, went along with this–thus bankrupting the Earl of Stirling and several major contributors to the project, including the Cunninghams of Glencairn, The Wallaces of Craigie, and damaging the Campbells, particularly the Ayrshire Loudons and their cadet houses, and some Hamiltons and Montgomery’s and the Campbells of Auchinbreck.
To partly compensate the families for their losses of the Nova Scotia colony, all that been put into it, and all that had been collected by the Crown and Parliament and not been repaid, Charles I and the English parliament then tried to assign some lands in Ireland to the investor families. This would have included the Campbells of Auchinbreck who had just paid for that title of baronet. Unfortunately, most of the lands were already owned, and he had to persuade large owners to part with some of their lands to the dispossessed Nova Scotia investors and baronets, without Parliament paying the Irish owners, either. Instead, Charles I and the English Parliament tried to confiscate more lands held by those suspected of still conspiring to wrest Ireland from the English crown, especially Irish Catholics. They also re-examined the titles to lands, and tenancies, given by the first plantationers, English, Welsh and Scottish, to any Irish, and revoked some. This was the purpose of the censes ordered by king and Parliament in 1629 and the early 1630's, on the pretense that too many lands that were intended to be given or sold to Scots, under the first Ulster plantations and Irish baronetcies Acts, as free holdings, not tenancies, were instead still tenancies.
There had been real abuses of the first plantation charters granted by James VI/I, but the real purpose of the investigations and census was wider, paying off without actual full repayment for losses, the ruined or damaged Nova Scotia investors and baronets. No one was happy with this combination of investigations and rearrangements of Irish lands, least of all the Irish. This was one of the causes of Sir Phelim O’ Neill’s rebellion of 1640-41, that eventually embroiled most of Ireland, and became entangled with the civil war that had erupted finally between King and Parliament, and eventually brought down the King. Thus, instead, the baronets, including Sir Dugald, were left to acquire what lands they could in Scotland and Ireland, with what remained of their wealth. ( Memorials of the Earl of Stirling and of the house of Alexander, by the Rev. Charles Rogers. Published 1877 by W. Paterson in Edinburgh , and the several volumes of Irish history of the Irish Plantations and the 1641 Rebellion by Rev. George Hill, almost all of which can now be found on-line.)
This was when the Campbells of Skeldon, Kilmory and others acquired lands in Ireland, but the main line of Auchinbrecks mostly sought to buy other lands in Scotland and did. However this is also when the Parson of Letterkenny appeared in Ireland and his lands by law should have continued to be inherited by his Auchinbreck cadet house relatives. The relationships between the Campbells of Argyll/Lochawe and some of their extended kin and the Stewart kings were never quite as warm afterward. In 1645, the second baronet Auchinbreck was killed at Inverlochy fighting (Graham of) Montrose. Montrose was for the king, Auchinbreck was not.
The second baronet had also spent time fighting the Irish uprising of Phelim O’Neill just a few years before, and his older brother who would have been second baronet died fighting O’Neill. Thus both brothers had been defending the new land owners in Ireland sent there by the king’s upending of the Nova Scotia project. He had little reason to love or feel loyalty to King Charles I by 1644. The king had taken a lot of money from his family and delivered little but strife.
Sir Dugald Campbell, 1st Baronet Auchinbreck, one of the “Nova Scotia baronets,”stayed in Scotland. He was already getting on in years when paid for and been made a baronet. He married 1st, Mary Erskine, daughter of Alexander Erskine of Gogar, and had two sons by her: Archibald Campbell, who died without heirs and predeceased his father, and Duncan Campbell, 2nd baronet. Sir Dugald Campbell married 2nd, Isabel Boyd and had no known sons by her. Sir Dugald Campbell died in 1641, the same year of Sir Phelim O’Neill’s rebellion.
Sir Duncan Campbell, 2nd Baronet Auchinbreck, was born 1592-1595 and died 2 February, 1645 at Inverlochy, fighting against Montrose during the civil war between Parliament and King Charles I. He had commanded Argyll’s forces in Ireland beginning in 1641, and was made governor of Rathlin Island in the far north of Ireland. Although there was a claim he had been murdered as a prisoner used as propaganda against the Royalists, according to eyewitness accounts in the McDonnell records, in a book on the McDonnells by Rev. George Hill, “Major General Alistair McDonnel (also called McColl) swept off head and helmet of the gallant Sir Duncan Campbell with a single blow of his two handed claymore during the battle, soon causing the surrender of the rest of the Campbells. He was married three times; first to Margaret Blair, daughter of Brice Blair of Blair by whom he had no sons. His second wife was a daughter of Maxwell of Newark by whom he had his oldest son, Sir Dugald Campbell, 3rd Baronet. Duncan then married Jean Colquhoun, a daughter of Alexander Colquhoun of Lusk and had Archibald Campbell of Knockmellie, father of Duncan Campbell, 4th Baronet, and Alexander Campbell, of Strondour–murdered in 1685, at the gates of Lochgair/Lochgare, after fleeing Carnassarie Castle (description of his death in Henrietta Lindsay-Campbell’s diary; she was at Lochgair when it happened; see Ladies of the Covenant, by Rev. James Anderson, available on-line) leaving a son Archibald. The third and fourth baronets of Auchinbreck were half brothers, not full brothers.
The youngest sons of Sir Duncan Campbell, 2nd Baronet and Jean Colquhoun then were James Campbell of Knockmellie who succeeded to Knockmellie when his nephew, Duncan, by his older brother Archibald became 4th baronet Auchinbreck, William Campbell of Wester Kames on the Isle of Bute, who married a daughter of Bannatyne of Kames, on Bute and had issue, and John Campbell of Knockmellie (who succeeded his next older brother, James) who also married a daughter of Bannatyne of Kames and had issue. He had descendants still living there in 1823 (as per Patterson’s History of Ayrshire, published in the 1880's and available on-line.) Some Burke’s editions have these youngest sons as younger brothers of Duncan, fourth baronet. J.R.N MacPhaill, K.C., in his Highland Papers, vol. IV, notes that claims that they were the younger brothers of Duncan, fourth baronet, are wrong from his own research.
Sir Duncan Campbell, 2nd Baronet also had two acknowledged natural sons, Donald and Duncan Campbell. MacPhaill did not know who their mothers were, nor what became of them and their descendants. However, a biographer of John Campbell, an early settler on the Borden Grant in Virginia did find out what happened to Duncan Campbell and his descendants. This is a large part of the Virginia Campbells and they are directly Auchinbreck, not Kilmory, just the “other side of the blanket”–from a natural son, not a son in a lawful marriage. Duncan Campbell was among those who went to Ireland after the rebellion of Phelim O’ Neill was put down, during the later part of the Cromwellian era when forfeited lands were available for acquisition.
Sir Dugald Campbell, 3rd Baronet Auchinbreck, b. 1610-15, d. May, 1660, as per a doctor’s invoice recorded with the Sheriffs of Inveraray, asking for “payment for treatment of Sir Dugald’s last illness.” (Volume 1 of the Records of the Sheriffs of Inveraray, published in 1901, found on-line at the Clan Campbell website). He left no sons. His next brother, Archibald Campbell, died at nearly the same time and left four sons, the oldest of which was, Duncan Campbell, 4th Baronet, a boy of not quite 10 years of age at the time.
Archibald Campbell of Knockmellie, 2nd son of Sir Duncan Campbell, 2nd Baronet Auchinbreck, Archibald b. ca. 1625, married about 1651, Margaret Campbell, b. ca. 1635, daughter of Sir Colin Campbell “tutor” (seneschal or guardian at this time) of Cawdor. Sir Colin Campbell had married Elizabeth Brodie, only daughter of David Brodie and Katherine Dunbar, 6th of June, 1634, as per the diary of her brother, Alexander Brodie. The oldest son of Archibald and Margaret (Campbell) Campbell , Duncan Campbell, 4th Baronet Auchinbreck, was born about 1652 He died in 1700, as a tribute to him was read at the end of that year in the Scottish parliament noting his recent death. .
The “tutor of Cawdor” was the guardian or steward line of the Thanes of Cawdor for lands and minor grandsons who were to become the next earl, in the event that the original heir and oldest son died leaving a minor heir. Colin was his father’s, Sir John Campbell, Thane of Cawdor’s second son. At this time, the Thanes of Cawdor were not yet Earls–that was a title granted by an English monarch. Colin Campbell’s mother was Jean Campbell, a daughter of Sir John Campbell of Glenorchy (Breadalbane Campbells, cadet branch).
The young Duncan Campbell, 4th Baronet’s principal guardian was the Earl of Argyll, as his feudal overlord and a kinsman, but he also had the attention of the family of the Thanes of Cawdor. However, as described above, Duncan’s mother was Margaret Campbell, daughter of Sir Colin Campbell, Tutor of Cawdor and 2nd son to Sir John Campbell of Cawdor, then Thane of Cawdor who died in 1642. When John Campbell, the Thane of Cawdor, and his son John were declared incompetent (1639) and the young son of John “Jr.” died at school, Colin’s own oldest son, Sir Hugh Campbell (1640-1716), then became Thane of Cawdor, making Duncan Campbell, 4th Baronet Auchinbreck, nephew to the Thane of Cawdor (The Thanes of Cawdor, by the First Earl of Cawdor, from his family’s records, published in the 1850's and found on-line). This connection was significant in Duncan’s lifetime, but was even more significant to the life of his own son and heir, James Campbell, 5th Baronet Auchinbreck.
This is a good time to cover the Ulster Branch of the Campbells of Auchinbreck-Kilmory. In 1612, another Campbell, said to be, in one source, a history of John Campbell of Lancaster Co., PA and later Augusta County, VA, a younger brother of this same Dugald and Archibald, Duncan Campbell, bought forfeited lands in Ulster. Actually the lands were in part, purchased by the Campbells of Auchinbreck indirectly, as part of Nova Scotia. This line was supposed to be in Nova Scotia, not Ireland, but after Nova Scotia was ruined and made French by Charles I, Irish lands were given to the Baronet Auchinbreck, and through him, his kinsmen of Kilmory instead. The purchase of the forfeited lands is documented; the actual identity of the purchaser is in error in that book. The author may be correct that John was a grandson of the Duncan who lived on the lands, but if so, then it was his father Duncan, the second baronet, who made the purchase–having been a dispossessed baronet of Nova Scotia with Irish lands being substituted for Canadian. Duncan, the second baronet, was having children only after 1615, and after the land had been purchased, as part of the deal for a baronetcy in 1612. Duncan “Jr.” was still little more than a child when his father died at Inverlochy in 1645. Duncan “Jr.” was out of the Auchinbreck house, he and his son or grandson, John were not styled, “Auchinbreck.” They were all an illegitimate line of the second baronet. Although by blood they were Auchinbreck, by the social mores of the day, they were not entitled to use their direct ancestor’s arms and sobriquet. Also there were two Duncan Campbells in Ireland, about fourth cousins to one another who are often confused with one another. The author did so in her speculation as to when the Duncan, who was John's father, acquired his land in Ireland, and where. However what is more problematic in this author’s work is the names of the children of John Campbell and how they compare with names in Ireland and when the earliest of those names occurs. So, all the foregoing is a nice story with bits and pieces of documented facts but not necessarily all linked to John Campbell of Lancaster Co, Pennsylvania and Augusta County, Virginia.
The first real Duncan Campbell with a documented proved line and proved acquisition of lands in the account of the Donegal, Ulster, land purchases and settlement, was the third son of Sir Donald Campbell of Kilmory, who was the third son of the third laird of Auchinbreck, who also had older brothers Dugald and Archibald. In the Kilmory line, this Duncan’s oldest brother Dugald died in 1612. Their father, Donald was succeeded by his second son, Archibald, as Laird of Kilmory. This is the line of the Parson of Letterkenny–whose line then died out in Ireland and thus cannot be the same line that emigrated to Pennsylvania. The author of the book on John Campbell compiled her book about 1950, and probably had acquired some knowledge of the post 1802 Auchinbreck line and the Duncan Campbell, vicar of Kilcenan who bought land for his son the Parson of Letterkenny. The author, though, apparently didn’t know that the part of it that was at Letterkenny in Donegal had died out. It’s not known if the land owned by the Kilmory-Letterkenny line went to the second Duncan, illegitimate son of the second baronet, as yet. The second baronet also acquired land as part of his baronetcy. The two Duncans could have acquired different pieces of land, intended for different sons of each, though they were both in Donegal. (MacPhaill’s Highland Papers, vol. IV was published in 1934 based on work he’d done much earlier, but was not widely available. Most copies were only in Scotland until a softbound reprint became available in 1995. MacPhaill’s Highland Papers, vol. IV. Burke’s Peerage is the source of part of the data given in this by J.R.N Macphaill in his Highland Papers, vol. IV, but he also cites additional materials he had found on this family, including a family tree of male heirs allegedly dated 1741 found by another researcher in the National Library of Scotland in a bound volume of MSS. 34.6.19, called “Genealogie of the Family of Auchinbreck from Duncan an Adhe 26th, in Mr. Duncanson’s Genealogie of the Family of Argyll.” There is no author stated for the genealogy and few citations of actual documents but it is contemporary with the life and times of the 5th baronet Auchinbreck, though he apparently was not consulted. It’s not even certain that the Duke of Argyll was consulted in this preparation from two researchers examination of this “genealogie.” The second part, of the cadet houses is much more detailed and documented and though the same clerk copied both parts, the researchers felt certain that the second part was actually written in the late 1750's by John Campbell of Kildallog.)
Here is what is known and reasonably well documented of Campbells who were in both Pennsylvania and later Augusta County, Virginia.. Among the earliest Campbell emigrants to Pennsylvania, were a brother and sister named John Campbell b. 16 Nov., 1674, at Drumboden, Donegal, near Londonderry, Ireland–d. 1 Jan., 1741 (gravestone in Virginia and family records) who married Grace (aka Grissell) Hay; and Mary Campbell, b. ca. 1690, married Moses White; their children were in the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley by 1750), and several children of John. These Campbells were believed to be all descendants of two Duncans, father and son, discussed in the previous paragraph. John and his sister Mary were believed to be grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, of a Duncan Campbell who bought forfeited lands in Ulster, by their own oral accounts to their children. John and Mary emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1720 according to some Campbell researchers. This is somewhat consistent with land and tax records found in Pennsylvania for this family (earliest records in PA thus far are in the 1730’s), and records in Augusta County, Virginia. Patrick Campbell (1696-1767), a son of John, in county court records in Virginia, stated that 1720 was when the family emigrated, and that “(he) and his father took up land in Conestoga/Donegal township (then Chester County, but later Lancaster County) and were members of the Derry Church in 1724.” Patrick Campbell was the first constable of Donegal township, but did not stay in Pennsylvania. Sons of this John Campbell b. 1674, included: Robert, Arthur, John Jr., William, James, Dugald, Patrick (b. 1696) and David (b. 1706). Patrick was the oldest son. Notice, there is NO Duncan among the names. There were also daughters, Catherine, Margaret and Mary. David, born in 1706, a middle son, was called “White David” to distinguish him from another relative. David’s grandson was John Campbell, a Treasurer of the early United States. (Official biography of him and his line done by State of Alabama). They arrived first in Orange County, VA between 1732 and 1741, but were found in Augusta County records (probably they never moved–the county lines did) in 1742. They were among the first 100 families to obtain land in the Borden Grant, but already had land on the Beverly Grant.. The families of the famous Revolutionary War General William Campbell and Col. Arthur Campbell descend from John Campbell (1674-1741) of this line also. (Chronicles of the Scotch-Irish, by Lyman Chalkley; on-line now through genweb sites of several Virginia counties; 3 volumes of summary abstracts of county records of Augusta, Rockbridge, Botetourt counties and a few from Albemarle, Rockingham, Orange, Goochland, and Amherst counties as well; Alabama State biography and family history of John Campbell, Treasurer of the U.S., ).
There are problems with the statements of the children of John Campbell. Note that his oldest son is named Patrick. This is significant. First, there was no Campbell male in Ireland other than for warfare before about 1630. There were two Campbell females who married a McDonell and an O’Neill much earlier but the truce between the Campbells and McDonells/McDonalds was very short lived and the O’Neills were not willing to give up lands to mercenaries, unlike the McDonells in Antrim. The O’Neills were on a territory grabbing rampage throughout the 16th century, and at times were doing their very best to eliminate the McDonnells in Antrim, when the English weren’t. Additionally during the reign of Elizabeth her favorites, particularly Essex, whom she made governor of Ulster made it clear they considered the Scots just as undesirable in Ireland as the native Irish. They slaughtered thousands of Scots in Antrim and Down who were McDonells, kin and allies in several planned assaults on these areas. Elizabeth did not decide upon her successor until her very last years. Her cousin James was a reluctant choice, made only because she had no other by the time she decided. Her father, grandfather, and sister Mary (“Bloody Mary”) had eliminated all other potential candidates. In the 1580's Elizabeth was as anti-Scot as her own favorites. So no Campbell settled in Ireland in the time of Elizabeth, or her three predecessors, unless they were living precariously alongside the beleagured McDonalds.
The truth is there was a Duncan and Dugald Campbell at Rinnisligloe, in Clondahorky parish in Kilmecrenan Barony, in County Donegal in 1665. This is the first time either of these names appear in the Irish records. This is not far from Letterkenny, but not that close to Drummaboden. In 1665 in the nearby parish of Clondavaddog (old records Clandevadock) were George Campbell at Mayross, John Campbell at Ballymagowne, PATRICK Campbell at Mayross, Robert Campbell at Maghrihubbert, and Widow Campbell at Balliherin. (This is from the hearth roll tax “census” of 1665.) The Clondavadogg/Clandevadock parish group has most of the names found among the children of John Campbell and his own name. Whether Duncan and Dugald in Clondahorky are related to the others in Clondavadogg is only a guess at this point. There’s nothing on-line to say yes or no.
Ten years earlier, in 1654, after the rebellion and civil wars that began in 1641 and ended in 1652, a civil survey was taken in Counties, Donegal, Derry (including Coleraine which was merged with the smaller county of Derry around the town of Londonderry and then became Derry), and Tyrone, in Ulster, of the landholders, who were a combination of survivors and those awarded forfeited lands, between 1651-53. On that civil survey, for either Donegal or Derry, were only: PATRICK Campbell, “Scotts, at Magheryhubert, Bellingmcgagby and Moycross, Protestant;” and Colin (spelled Colyn) Campbell, “Scotts, at Belliherinmore and Bellinherinbeg (more and beg mean big and little, respectively), Protestant.” These two gentlemen were in Clandevadock parish. There are no Duncan and Dugald in the county as yet. (Civil Survey done upon orders of parliament in 1654 of seven counties where the greatest amount of forfeited lands were.)
It is clear from these two records that Patrick Campbell b. ca. 1610, was the father of a Robert Campbell b. ca. 1635 who then has the same lands as the father did ten years earlier at Magheryhubert and that the “Widow” Campbell is the widow of Colin Campbell as in 1665 she is on the lands owned by Colin in 1654. George Campbell is undoubtedly another son as he is also living upon land owned by Patrick in 1654. The townland of Ballymagowne (Ballymagowan in other records) is adjacent to Mayross/Moyross indicating the likelihood that John Campbell is a third son of Patrick. This John Campbell is an adult by 1665, so he can’t be the John born in 1674. It seems likely that John born in 1674 is, by the naming tradition of the day, more likely descended from Patrick born ca. 1610. Who Patrick’s father is, is yet unknown. Perhaps Duncan and Dugald were younger sons of this Patrick, or not? More research is needed.
These are all names found among the children of John Campbell b. 1674, as well as Dugald, who was living next to Duncan in the neighboring parish of Clondahorky. The best evidence is all of the Campbells in Donegal in the two neighboring parishes of Clondevadogg and Clondahorky were sons of Patrick and Colin, more likely most of the former. Colin died between 1654-65 and left a widow but no others on his lands. Colin was probably a brother to Patrick, as he had nearly the same amount of land as Patrick did in 1654; each had 380 acres on a main parcel, and then a little more. Also adjacent to them was a Patton family that arrived at about the same time and was also listed as “Scotts” and “Protestant.” The Patton family from this very area of Ireland was also in Augusta County by the 1740's. Civil Court records involving an inheritance that is in both Ireland and Virginia indicate the origins of the Patton family, which continued to live near the descendants of Patrick Campbell for about 100 years.
Patrick Campbell, b. ca. 1610, was the immigrant ancestor from Scotland to County, Donegal, Ireland about 1652–after the Cromwellian warfare when forfeited lands in Ireland were being redistributed.. One of his younger sons could have been Duncan b. ca. 1642 or so, who could have been the father of John b. 1674, the immigrant to Pennsylvania and then to Virginia where he died in 1741. Patrick had a brother named Colin, who appears to have been younger and died as a relatively young man. The reference to “grandfather, Duncan” from the children of John could have been on their father’s maternal line. John’s (b. 1674) grandfather was very likely Patrick (b. 1610), and John’s own father may have been another Patrick, for whom he named his eldest son, in 1696.
The original land grants for the plantations chartered between 1609-1612, show no Campbells. Three Campbell brothers, David, Hugh and Charles, came with Viscount Montgomery, their kinsman through the Campbell gentlemen’s mother who was sister to the Viscount’s wife, in 1607, and settled in County Down. (Sources: The “Campbell Papers” in the “Caldwell Collection” in the Royal Irish Society of Sciences and Humanities Library, Dublin, Ireland; Rev. George Hill’s four volume series on the Settling of Ulster citing the original land grants and the first census in 1629-30; “Montgomery Manuscripts,” records of the Viscount of Greater Ards and his descendants, Earls of Mount Alexander, found on-line. Note: the Viscount of Greater Ards was a younger son of the Earl of Eglinton who owned land in Ayrshire, as per Paterson’s History of Ayrshire, and “The Montgomery Manuscripts.”) This line is the Campbells of Skeldon line and will have more detail later. The Earl of Eglinton had been financially damaged in the Nova Scotia adventure.
Sir Duncan Campbell, 4th baronet Auchinbreck, was the oldest nephew of the 3rd baronet, and son of Dugald’s, 3rd baronet’s, next younger brother, Archibald of Knockmellie. Duncan was born about 1651-2 and died in November, 1700. Duncan married Henriette Lindsay, youngest daughter of Alexander Lindsay, 1st Earl of Balcarres, who died in exile in France, in 1659, after fighting the Marquess of Montrose, and his wife Anne McKenzie, a daughter of Sir Colin McKenzie, 1st Earl of Seaforth.
The marriage of Sir Duncan Campbell, 4th Baronet Auchinbreck and Henriette Lindsay was arranged and took place in the summer of 1674, when she had turned 18 years of age. This was a few months after Henriette had been summoned by her mother to Inveraray when her mother became concerned about her daughter’s excessive religious fervor. The summons was just after her 16th year.
Henriette Lindsay apparently didn’t need a lot of persuading to marry Duncan Campbell. She liked her husband, considered him good-looking, and also noted that the wealth, and political affinity as well as the feudal and blood relationships of the Baronets of Auchinbreck, whom she described as “second in consequence only to Argyll.” (observations from her own journals, excerpts of which appeared in Ladies of the Covenant.)
In 1680, Henriette’s step-father, Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl of Argyll was accused of support for outlawed Covenanters and formally arrested and accused of treason. It was clear from the investigations and their tone, the judgment was already decided; the trial but a formality. Henriette’s older sister, Sophia Lindsay, helped her step-father escape from prison. He fled to the Netherlands but did not find himself welcomed warmly enough by William of Orange at that time, and then foolishly joined the Monmouth rebellion in 1685. He borrowed 30,000 pounds from Henriette’s husband, Duncan Campbell, 4th baronet of Auchinbreck to arm and supply his men for the rebellion and commanded Duncan’s support as hereditary, feudal, “colonel of arms for Argyll.” The rebellion was doomed from the start, Argyll having been betrayed before he even arrived again in Scotland. He was captured and imprisoned again, and this time his step-daughter Sophia was also imprisoned and his wife kept under close house arrest. He was executed on the “Maiden” the early Scottish form of guillotine, on June 30, 1685 and his estates made forfeit, all except the house and adjoining property at Stirling which he’d thoughtfully made over to his second wife, Anna in 1674.
Sophia Lindsay, who eventually married the third son of her deceased step-father, was eventually released to her mother but her brother in law, Duncan Campbell of Auchinbreck was pursued by the Earl of Atholl at the king’s command and a price put on Duncan Campbell’s head of 1800 marks, dead or alive. Duncan Campbell, 4th baronet Auchinbreck, was forced to flee to Holland, where he did find a welcome and more pleasant reception than Argyll had, by William of Orange, who made him an adviser and eventually Captain in his invading army. (Papers Illustrating the History of the Scots Brigades in the Service of...(starting with William of Orange and continuing with the Hanovers), vol. I, publications of the Scottish Historical Society, 1899, found on-line through Google books on-line)
“Duncan’s uncle, Campbell of Strondour, was harried from Carnissarrie Castle as it was destroyed and murdered as he arrived at the gates of Lochgair,” from Henriette’s accounts of those events. Then the McLean’s of Duarte, followers of Atholl, sacked the manor of Lochgair and stole the large, carved documents chest, dumping centuries of family papers on the floor of the room in which it had rested. The manor and rest of Auchinbreck properties were ordered forfeit by the king and given to Lord Melfort (another Campbell), who mercifully did not take up residence. In 1689, when the property was restored to Duncan Campbell, he and his wife were living in Edinburgh and he was lamenting the loss of his papers and the damage done to Lochgair. His wife believed the papers were still there, told him so, and went to Lochgair and found them exactly where they’d been dumped by McLean and gathered some boxes and trunks put the papers in them and then hauled them to Edinburgh until Lochgair could be made fit to live in again. Some papers had been taken to Atholl but were also returned, though Henrietta could not be sure how many had been taken and not returned. Most of the papers of the paper did still exist by the 1690’s but probably not all as the king’s men would have been looking for evidence of treason and any other crimes.
The first years for Sir Duncan Campbell, the 4th baronet of Auchinbreck and his wife Henriette Lindsay, and their son James, after William and Mary were crowned, were happy years. Duncan’s estates, title and prominence were restored, and the little family prospered financially. However, there were political concerns in Scotland. William and Mary had no children and it was uncertain who would succeed them if that continued. Anna McKenzie, widow now of both Balcarres and Argyll was kin by blood and marriage to the McLeod chiefs on Skye. In 1695, Roderick McLeod the oldest surviving son of the McLeod Chief John (Iain “Breac”) McLeod married Margaret McKenzie, a first cousin once removed of Anna McKenzie, mother of Henriette Lindsay-Campbell and grandmother of James Campbell, heir to the 4th baronet Auchinbreck. One year later, James Campbell, heir to Auchinbreck, and later 5th baronet married Roderick’s sister, Janet, the following year, in 1696. The McLeod’s had supported James VII/II, and had Duncan Campbell not been sent away from his area command in the last couple of days before the ambush of the supporters of William of Orange at Killecrankie, could have been killed by his future brother-in-law. Even though William had finally forgiven the last of the clans who had supported James VII/II, there were strains. However, William had no children and had acquired the throne through his wife.
According to the McLeod Archives in the Public Records Office of Edinburgh, Scotland, a marriage contract was drawn up for Sir James Campbell, of Auchinbreck, son and fiar of Duncan Campbell, baronet, and Janet McLeod, daughter of Iain (John) McLeod (“Iain Breac McLeod” in the list of chiefs of Clan McLeod), dated 11th July, 1696. They were married in July, 1696. (PRO of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland, “McLeod Archives,” manuscript reference no. NRAS2950/1/72)
Nonetheless, something went terribly awry in Henriette’s and Duncan’s marriage by 1698, when her husband, Duncan, 4th baronet Auchinbreck changed his religion to Catholicism, and resigned his seat in Parliament, to Henriette’s shock and dismay. Duncan died less than two years later, in November, 1700 (a resolution in the Scots Parliament was made in December, 1700 commending him for his service to king and nation), and his son, James as a Protestant 5th baronet Auchinbreck, immediately sought his father’s seat in Parliament, which he gained in 1702, serving between 1703 and 1707 when the Act of Union passed. According to his parliamentary biography Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck actually shepherded the second proposed act by the English through the Scottish parliament, which makes his later actions quite astounding for showing complete reversal of allegiance. . Duncan also had an illegitimate son named Donald who prospered as a merchant but did not marry and did not have children, though the lack of marriage and children is not proved by any documentation..
Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck, 3rd Baron Auchinbreck, was the only legitimate son and child of Duncan, the 4th baronet. James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck, was born on January 30, 1675. He was born premature, when his mother and father had gone to Edinburgh for a short trip before her intended “confinement and lying in.” She spent months fully recovering from his birth and was unable to ever bear children again.
James Campbell, 5th baronet, had three, wives and 16 children, 12 of whom lived to be adults. He had fiver surviving children by his first wife Janet: Duncan, James, Gilbert, Jane and Anne (a son Dugald died as an older child or teen); four by his second wife Susanna: William, Alexander, Mary, and Elizabeth,, and three by his last wife, Margaret: Margaret, Donald (died as a boy–according to some editions of Burke and others, and lived to be an adult and lived in Scotland but nothing further is known, according to other editions)) and Camerone. James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck, lived to be nearly 82 years of age! A grandson James (1721-1814, a captain in the UK army), son of his oldest son, Duncan, succeeded him in the title and did die without children.. . The 5th baronet’s first wife was Janet McLeod, daughter of John (Iain “Breac”) McLeod, whom he married July, 1696 on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. His second wife was Susannah Campbell of Cawdor, daughter of Sir Alexander Campbell, oldest son who predeceased his father Sir Hugh Campbell, Thane of Cawdor, whom the baronet married 21 Dec. 1717 in Westminster City, now a part of London, England. The baronet’s third and last wife was Margaret Campbell, daughter of Donald Campbell, deceased of the Campbells of Glencarradale, whom he married in Argyllshire, Scotland, on 20th April, 1736. A marriage settlement for the third wife, Margaret, and children by her, should he predecease her, was written in October, 1736, and filed with the Sheriff of Inveraray, in 1739. (See Sheriffs Records of Inveraray, vol. 1, published in 1901, and put on-line by Clan Campbell)
Janet McLeod, first wife of James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck, was Janet McLeod of Dunvegan, a daughter of Ian (John) Breac McLeod and sister to Roderick and Norman McLeod (as per official Clan McLeod family trees and related notes) . John McLeod was born in 1637, according to the official McLeod history of the chiefs and was chief between 1664-1693, when he died. He was married to Florence McDonald, sister of Sir James McDonald of Sleat (another part of the Isle of Skye), about 1660. His older brother, whom John succeeded as clan chief, had been married to Margaret McKenzie, a cousin of Henrietta Lindsay-Campbell’s mother, Anne McKenzie-Lindsay-Campbell (twice widowed by this time.). The McKenzies had also become lords of the Isle of Lewis and even had among their titles “Lords McLeod of Lewis.” Lewis was one of the islands previously held by the McLeods and they wanted to regain control. For the duration, they were not eager to antagonize the McKenzies, but rather were inclined to intermarry with them to regain the island in that way. John McLeod’s son, Norman who succeeded him as clan chief and was at Killiecrankie, was born in 1685 and was a YOUNGER brother of Janet. Even her brother Roderick, chief just before her brother Norman, was younger than at least two of his three sisters who survived infancy, and born in 1674. Janet’s brother, Roderick McLeod, married Margaret McKenzie, a daughter of the 3rd Earl of Seaforth and second cousin once removed to Henrietta Lindsay-Campbell, about 1695. Given that Janet’s marriage to Henriette’s son James occurred in 1696, there is no doubt that the McLeods and the Campbells of Auchinbreck were drawn closer again by the marriage of Roderick McLeod and Margaret McKenzie and it’s likely Henriette attended the wedding. Certainly her much stronger mother would have done so. Roderick, unfortunately died in 1699. Brother Norman didn’t marry a McKenzie nor a Campbell.
By Janet McLeod, James Campbell, eventually 5th Baronet Auchinbreck, had Duncan, born in 1697, whose own son James, b. 1721, ultimately became 6th baronet and the last of this line of baronets of Auchinbreck. Second was James b. 1698 who died in exile in Spain, in 1741 or 1744, leaving only a daughter; then, possibly a Dugald who died as an infant; followed by Gilbert b. 1700-1705. Anne was born in 1710-13 and married, as per the Camerons of Lochiel memoirs published in France in the 18th century, Donald Cameron of Lochiel, “Gentle Lochiel” of the 1745 rising, in 1730-1. The first son and child of Anne Campbell and Donald Cameron was born in 1732. Jane Campbell, identified as a daughter of the baronet and his first wife was married to Alisdair or Alexander McAlister, identified as “of Loup” by the dubious Burke’s Peerage but also acknowledged by Clan McAlister, though they identify him as Alisdair McAllister. Born to James Campbell, 5th baronet and his second wife, Susanna, were Mary, Elizabeth, William, and Alexander. The younger four siblings to Anne, are named in two lawsuits, so at least those four are from the second wife. . Margaret was stated to have a daughter Margaret who married a kinsman, Dr. Thomas Campbell by Burke’s but whose will and other records was actually Dr. Lionel Campbell, , a son, Donald, who may or may not have died as a boy, and another Camerone Campbell, but some sources, including the dubious Burke’s, claim she had four children who survived infancy and don’t name the fourth son, or call him Dugald, and say he died without marrying and again there is no documentation of any of these claims.. Again, this list of children needs further substantiation. Margaret was with child when her husband drew up the marriage settlement in October 1736, but vol. 1 of the Sheriff’s Records of Inveraray, stops at about 1745 so there is nothing further on this marriage from that source.
Now there is that Lort Inheritance Dispute which has caused a lot of problems when people want to believe allegations in a complaint are automatically true. This is the source of the allegation of a second marriage between Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck and Susanna Campbell, daughter of Sir Alexander Campbell, heir to Sir Hugh Campbell, Thane of Cawdor and his wife Elizabeth Lort. That part of the allegation was true: the baronet did marry his cousin December 21, 1717, but other claims were NOT true. The case was a mixed collection of truths and lies from the plaintiff. The judges only chose to deal with a few of the issues of the case. They did find the general veracity of the plaintiff to be lacking, which of course cast suspicion on ALL the allegations and claims, including her own marriage and the parentage of her daughter, which caused court investigators to go to Spain to verify what they could. The plaintiffs were indeed the proved wife and daughter of James Campbell a son of the baronet. Unfortunately for the plaintiff, however, her husband and her daughter were not related to that second marriage of the 5th baronet to his cousin who was a Lort family heiress. James was a son of the first wife and had been in Spain, as a grown man, for some 20 years before he died in either 1741 or 1744 and had served the Spanish as an officer, in the 1730’s against England. . However, other descendants of that second marriage do exist and some settled in Jamaica and some of the Jamaican descendants may have had their own descendants find their way to the U.S. in the 19th century. Many descendants of original Scots and English settlers left Jamaica when slavery ended and the sugar plantations were not as profitable. Some settled in the southern U.S. in the 1830’s and 1840’s..
Elizabeth and Gilbert Lort were the only two surviving children of Sir John Lort, 2nd baronet Stackpole of Pembrokeshire Wales and his wife, Susanna. Gilbert Lort, the only son, died at the age of 28 without having married and without children in 1698. He’s interred in London, in what used to be the city of Westminster, as are his father, his mother and a nephew by his sister, Elizabeth, Gilbert Campbell. When Gilbert Lort died, he named his sister and her children as his heirs. His sister, Elizabeth married Sir Alexander Campbell of Cawdor in 1689. A detailed account of how they met, the marriage date, and the settlement of Islay upon Sir Alexander after his marriage is all in The Thanes of Cawdor, by John Campbell, First Earl of Cawdor, citing numerous primary source family records from the archives of the Campbells of Cawdor at Cawdor Castle at Nairn. Alexander Campbell, himself, also died suddenly in 1698, leaving the widow, Elizabeth Lort-Campbell and four children, one of whom was a daughter, Susanna and two sons, Gilbert and John Campbell. Gilbert Campbell died when he was just about 21 in some kind of accident in February 1711 and was interred in London. This left his younger brother John Campbell, born in 1695 (came of age in 1716–very soon after his grandfather, Sir Hugh Campbell, Thane of Cawdor died in March, 1716) and two sisters, Susanna and Anna. Susanna is said in unsubstantiated claims to have been older than John, but probably not by much. She would have been at least 23 when married Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet Auchinbreck in December, 1717. Susanna’s mother’s name was Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s own mother was named Susanna so there is justification for belief that Susanna Campbell was an older sister to her brother, John. Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet would have been nearly 44, more than 20 years older than his wife.
Sir Hugh Campbell, Thane of Cawdor died, luckily for the Campbells of Cawdor in March, 1716 and was interred at Nairn on 29th March, 1716. This was shortly after he’d been served the king’s letter demanding he turn anyone in his family or under his command in, for the king’s justice after the ill-fated Earl of Mar’s rebellion in 1715. His grandson, John Campbell, was spared because he’d been lawfully under his grandfather’s command and was not yet of age at the time of the rebellion when he’d been commanded to leave Pembrokeshire, where his mother had taken her children in 1698 and where she lived when not most of the time in London, to roust the men of Islay, join the Campbells of Auchinbreck and march south with them into Ayrshire. He also could not lead the men of Islay eastward as Argyll’s men and allies (including the Ayrshire Campbell Earl of Loudon) had the east and south under their control. Thus any effort on John’s part died before it truly began.
A second letter had been sent by Sir Hugh Campbell to Sir James Campbell of Auchinbreck and he also responded by gathering the men under his command, including his own older sons and joining those under the command of the young John Campbell, grandson of the Thane. At that point, James Campbell, second son of Auchinbreck would have become well acquainted with John Campbell if he hadn’t before. He would have known the family, before, however, as he was a great-nephew of Sir Hugh Campbell, Thane of Cawdor and second cousin to Alexander Campbell, John’s father. Alexander Campbell (1662-1698) and his children lived on Islay between 1689-98. James Campbell lived in “mid-Argyllshire.” Both were under a certain amount of legal control of the Sheriff of Inveraray and witnessed and signed documents for men under each other. Alexander and James were about 13 years apart in age with Alexander being the elder, and superior in rank in the area.
Now we turn to another line of Campbells in Virginia. It also may turn out to be larger than what initial evidence shows.
The Woods of Counties Antrim (and maybe Meath) , Armagh and Louth, and: Campbells of Skeldon (cadet house to Loudon, through Cessnock) Connection, and to Virginia:
Michael and Samuel Woods married two Campbell sisters or cousins who were grand-daughters of Hugh Campbell the second of three brothers who were sons of the younger son of the laird of Skeldon who tenanted Dovecoate Hall, now called Ardeer (house had been moved inland and then eventually torn down) owned by the Earl of Eglin, and which was in constant danger of being swept out to sea in a large enough storm. They arrived in Ireland in 1607 with their uncle Sir Hugh Montgomery of Braidstane, who became Viscount of Greater Ards in County Down and adjacent counties. David, Charles and Hugh Campbell arrived in the service of Montgomery as their grandmother, Marion Shaw, was sister to the Viscountess, Elizabeth Shaw Montgomery. Sir Hugh was a younger grandson of an earlier Earl of Eglinton and this is important. A grandmother to the father of Charles and Hugh was a daughter of an earlier Montgomery Earl of Eglinton, married to a Campbell laird of Cessnock. These Campbells had both blood and marriage relations to the Montgomery Earls.
In 1683, according to a website called “Irish Deed Index” (not government affiliated), Charles Campbell I was handling the estate of Anne Chamney and had to come to Dublin and County Meath to manage and sell properties there on her behalf. He then set up residence in Dublin and some time between 1683 and by 1699 had bought a piece of property at New Grange in the parish of Ardrath in County Meath. He first leased it by 1654 as per his 1641 rebellion deposition of that year. This is a neighboring parish to the union of parishes called “Dunshaughlin,” in which a Woods’ family owned land. This was the maternal line of Samuel, Michael, John, Elizabeth, Sarah, etc. Woods. Their parents were both surnamed Woods. Their father was from Antrim and possibly Armagh (a 1698 will of the grandfather of Samuel and Michael was in Antrim but the heirs were not then living in Antrim). The mother, as per DNA testing was of a line of Woods of Monaghan, Cavan and Kildare and a branch of that line owned land in Meath in and near Dunshaughlin. However what became known as the old Woods residence was not built until after 1691 and it is not certain the mother of the Woods immigrants was from the southern branch of the family that had the Meath lands. Additional to the Chamney transactions, Charles Campbell I and Charles Campbell II, a son of his, handled a few real estate legal matters for the Woods families in the Dublin and Meath area and many matters for Sir Hans Hamilton who had a daughter who married into the Woods family. In fact, his daughter and her husband named a son, Hans Hamilton Woods.
Charles Campbell I and his brother Hugh, initially began to acquire lands at/near Donaghdee in County Down. Then Charles acquired two more parcels, including one at Kilkeel. Charles Campbell’s wife was named Elizabeth. She was signing off on real estate transfers in Dublin as widow of Charles Campbell by 1714. It appears he died about 1710-11. Charles Campbell II, son to Charles Campbell I, was born about 1680 and married between 1700-1705 to Catherine Moore. There was one surviving child, a daughter of the marriage of Charles Campbell II and Catherine Moore. It was not a happy marriage and the wife spent most of her life away from her husband’s homes in Dublin and County Meath. Charles Campbell II was a barrister and his law partner was Andrew Caldwell who married Charles’ sister, Catherine Campbell in 1706. The two men shared a law office on Capel Street in Dublin. Charles Campbell II, died 30th October, 1725, will written 27th October, 1725. In the will he mentioned his deceased daughter, Catherine, his son-in-law, Samuel Burton and his two grandchildren, Catherine and Benjamin Burton. To the latter he left his entire estate in trust until Benjamin would come of age, except for an annuity his appointed trustees would pay to Charles’ widow, once a year, and other designated bequests. In his will, Charles Campbell II mentioned he also had brothers named Benjamin Hugh Campbell and John Campbell who had both named a son, Charles. A letter from his wife to him in the Campbell part of the Caldwell Collection at the Library of the Royal Irish Academy of Humanities and Sciences in Dublin also mentions a sister of Charles Campbell II named Anne, who was not named in the will. The Campbell papers in the Caldwell collection also include a copy of a will of David Campbell of County Down who was the oldest brother of the three brothers who came to Ireland.
Charles Campbell II’s brothers Benjamin Hugh Campbell and John Campbell had predeceased him and he said so. He also indicated that brother, John, had a son named John, in addition to another named Charles. John Campbell Jr. lived in Dublin, as per the deed indices and other items in the Campbell papers.
Charles Campbell is a name that occurs among a very few Campbell lines in Virginia besides that of Gilbert Campbell of Augusta County. It is also found among two other Campbell families who were living next to the families of the children of Samuel Woods and his wife Elizabeth Campbell. These same families lived near the Woods in Pennsylvania in the same area of Lancaster County.
Charles Campbell II was granted right to arms by the Royal Master of Arms in Ulster in 1692 and then again by the Lord Lyon of Scotland in 1693, who also stated in the grant, that “these were the arms of Campbell of Skeldon as Charles Campbell II was a grandson of Skeldon, which was a cadet house to Loudon.” The Irish sons of the younger son of the laird were “bumped up in status,’ when the head of the house of Loudon died without a male heir and Cessnock’s son (only one) succeeded. The senior of Skeldon would have then become Cessnock and the junior, Skeldon proper. (Catalogue to the Campbell papers as part of the Caldwell Papers, the catalogue was published and a copy is in the New York City Public Library and was placed on-line recently.) Charles Campbell II and his father, Charles Campbell I, had both been members of the Irish parliament, more than once.
Michael Woods’ oldest son, Archibald was definitely born in 1706. Two grandsons of Michael left Bible records/notes with exact birthdates and places for the three sons of Michael who were named in his will. One set of records is called “Michael Woods Age Books” and were created by Michael Woods, son of Archibald Woods, the first Michael Woods’ oldest son, with the help of his father, Archibald. Michael Woods, son of Archibald was born in 1735; he definitely knew both his father and grandfather and he also states in his first “Age Book” that his paternal grandparents were Michael Woods and Mary Campbell. The two “Age Books,” in the collection, are both a list of marriages, births and deaths of family members, and a partial diary, describing the family’s movements from Virginia, to South Carolina, to Tennessee and finally to Montgomery, Alabama. Additionally, John Woods, the son of Michael “Sr.” and Mary (Campbell) Woods, born in 1712, had a headstone still standing and readable after the U.S. Civil War, found by Rev. Neander Woods of Albemarle County, Virginia, in Albemarle County.
A letter from the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania Historical Society sent to the late Ruth Lamar Petracek and mentioned in her book Woods-Wallace Cousin Clues, self-published in 1978, stated that Samuel Woods and his wife and other Woods and Campbells were members of the Donegal Presbytery and listed among the first pew holders at the church near Paxtang. Tax records show Woods and Campbells in the same area. A 1739 lawsuit first filed in Pennsylvania and later transferred to Augusta County, Virginia, mentions both Michael and Samuel Woods and sons and daughters of theirs and describes some of the relationships. Richard Woods was the oldest son of Samuel and born between 1705 and 1709. He was married as many as three times.. We know his second wife was Elizabeth Woods whom he married well before 1750. He is believed to have been married to her about the time he came to Virginia. An old letter mentioned in Deborah Sampson’s book Kith and Kin and unfortunately not cited verbatim with full details of the persons writing and receiving the letter nor the exact date, states that three Woods children of Samuel and their spouses to be rode together to the Orange County courthouse to register their marriages and then to the nearest Episcopal church to have the marriages sanctioned by church, as there was no permanent Presbyterian minister in the area and the Episcopal church (Church of England) was the official church allowed by the government to perform marriages at this time. We know who at least one of the three was and it was a sister of Richard so it’s quite possible he was another of the three siblings. This was in either 1740 or 1741.
A county historian from Missouri, John Lapsley Mills who researched these families claimed he found the grave-stones/headstones for Samuel Woods and his wife at the first cemetery for the area in which they lived, which became ultimately the burying ground for “old” New Monmouth Church north of what is now Lexington, Virginia on Highway 11. He claimed the wife’s surname was Campbell. The first name Elizabeth comes from the consistent name used by the daughters of this couple for the oldest or second oldest daughter. John Lapsley Mills was quite clear about the location of this cemetery and even these oldest stones. He pointed out that some time early in the 20th century, the road intersection nearest the church site and cemetery had been rebuilt and a number of graves had to be moved but the very oldest were left in an overgrown area on the west side of the new intersection. My husband and I visited this area and saw the cemeteries as described. Unfortunately by the time we were exploring, both sides had become overgrown and I sprained both ankles in the first 15 minutes in the “newer” supposedly better maintained side, where the state’s historic marker was, and never made it across the highway to the overgrown area I could see that clearly had what were once cultivated plantings. Cypresses, cedars, pines and roses are often planted near old cemeteries. In fact, several historians have said, when looking for an old cemetery or old house site, look for cypresses and pines that seem out of place. Sure enough, some were still there on the west side of the road that I could not explore.
Samuel Woods and Elizabeth (Campbell) Woods’ oldest sons were born at nearly the same time, as Michael’s, based on some marriage records for them and the age of children when they died. William Woods, a younger son of Samuel died in the “Fort Upper Tract Massacre” in 1758 in the French and Indian War (aka “The Seven Years War”). William’s oldest three children, a son and two daughters were teenagers, aged 16 or 17, 15 and 14 when he died. Several much younger children had been left with Martha’s relatives in the Shenandoah Valley and she rejoined them when she was released from captivity. They are not named but their existence is stated in Chalkley’s Chronicles... William Woods died intestate and his estate was administered in 1758-9 in Augusta County, Virginia (Chalkley’s Chronicles of the Scotch-Irish, summary abstracts of several counties’ records in three volumes, which can be found on-line).
Samuel and Michael Woods, brothers, have been described as being among the numerous children of “Sir” (title is not proved) John Woods and his alleged cousin, Elizabeth Woods of Dunshaughlin Castle, County Meath. The problem with this all is, there is no evidence he had even been knighted, but may have been a gentleman, He was related to the wealthy and well respected Fitzsimons/Fitzsimmons, who descended from Norman knights and owned land in several counties and a townhouse in Dublin, as per various Irish records. Also if Elizabeth (the best evidence is that this was indeed her name) was a cousin it was distant from the DNA analysis of direct descendants. She was from a family with two branches and it also is not entirely sure she was from the southern branch of children of Sir Thomas Woods and Anne Hoey (daughter of Sir John Hoey and Jane Parsons, 4th daughter of the baronet Bellamont) that had lands at Dunshaughlin, There is no evidence that the Woods’ of Augusta and Albemarle Counties were ever in Dunshaughlin as that town name was added to the “age book” of Michael’s oldest son and grandson, later. The one fact is a Woods’ family did have land there, and at a second site called Winter Lodge near the Meath-Dublin county line, and they were two different families. Later records in Meath, including cemetery records show at least three families by the mid 1700’s and it’s not clear how well related to one another they were. More research into these families is needed–difficult because some of the earliest records of the parish were destroyed in a fire during the rebellion of 1798. There were later records that described some of the history of members of the union of parishes that comprised Dunshaughlin and were used in Rev. Hamlet McClenaghan’s History of Dunshaughlin, but of his two volumes, the second being mostly footnotes from his transcriptions of records that were later destroyed in 1922 in the PRO explosion and fire,, the second is now missing. The good Reverend had left his work to the Dean who had helped him and when the Dean died, his wife cleaned house and stored some things in the cellar and elsewhere and separated the two volumes. Descendants don’t believe the volume was destroyed but they have yet to find it again. Rev. McClenaghan claimed that Elizabeth Woods was of the southern branch and had inherited land in Dunshaughlin but this needs to be verified. It is not certain. However, SHE was the heiress to the castle and lands around it, not John. Elizabeth, if she was out of the southern branch was the oldest or second oldest daughter (of several of Sir Thomas Woods, “knight, gentleman of Dunshaughlin” and Anne Hoey., The marriage of Sir Thomas Woods and Anne Hoey, took place in 1658,just before the Petty survey, which showed a household of two persons for Sir Thomas Woods, in Queen’s County (Laois) where he had other property,, later the same year. The Hoey’s main seat was in Wicklow County, and the Parsons had land there also. Both also owned property in Dublin. The Hoey’s built Hoey’s Court in Dublin. The next brother to Sir William Parsons, first baronet of Bellamont was Laurance, baronet of Birr, who owned Birr Castle in County Offaly. Both Sir John Hoey, and Sir William Parsons had land in and around Dunshaughlin One parcel came to the Hoey’s as part of the dowry of Jane Parsons when she married Sir John Hoey.. Thomas Woods also had a deed in the deed index for land near Parsonstown, and he was interred in Dunshaughlin parish in County Meath
Sir Thomas Woods was found to be listed as an in-law in the will and administration records of Sir William Parsons of Bellamont and was charged, with other family members with determining the suitability of marriages of grand-daughters. The grand-daughters were to forfeit half their inheritances if they married against the committee of relatives’ wishes. However, at least one Burke’s and a few other sources were wrong about who Sir Thomas Woods married. He married a grand-daughter of Sir William Parsons, not a daughter.
The daughter, Elizabeth Parsons is proved to have married Sir Thomas Worsop and she and her daughter, Elizabeth received a lease for some property in Dunshaughlin that they could then sublease as a profit which they did. However, their descendants resented other members of the families for having inherited the rights to land ownership outright, rather than leases. The friction is mentioned in several records. Elizabeth Woods had at least two brothers and several sisters.Elizabeth Worsop married John Wood of Rossmead, Westmeath and had NO children. Her heirs were nieces and nephews who fought over her leases and more and then fought with the Woods’s, according to McClenaghan’s research and the chain of conveyances on the leases which had additional details. (Registry of Deeds in Dublin; will of Sir William Parsons, baronet of Bellamont, etc.)
A daughter of Elizabeth Woods and John Woods, and who was sister to Michael, Samuel, et al, another Elizabeth Woods, married Samuel Wallace, of the Wallaces who had lands in County Down. John Woods’ parents were said to be another John Woods, Esq. of Yorkshire, England, and his wife Isabella Bruce, “of Scottish descent.” (Burke’s Irish peerage and gentry: Woods of Milverton Hall.) It’s all hooey (pardon the pun.) Not a shred of truth in it, based on both DNA testing and records in the Registry of Deeds and PRONI, and Betham’s Notes and Pedigrees.
Although there was a John Woods in County Meath who witnessed a will of a Rev. Bonning in 1654, he did not live there. He appears to have been visiting, perhaps looking at land to acquire after the Cromwellian forfeitures. He is not reported as having been in later records seen by McClenaghan and there were no large houses built in the Dunshaughlin area until much later based on other records. The names Samuel, Michael and John occurred together in only one place in Ireland in the mid to late 1600’s and early 1700’s where they lived, based on land records, wills, etc. This was in Antrim, near Belfast and later a branch of this family was in Armagh by the late 1600’s. The Woods’ who were the paternal line of the emigrants who were some of the first settlers on the Borden Grant, were always associated with the Hamiltons of Clanboye; always leasing or buying lands from Sir James Hamilton’s descendants, or his brothers’ children. The Woods’ were geographically quite close at times to the children and grandchildren of Hugh Campbell who had the most children and grandchildren of the three Campbell of Skeldon brothers who came with Sir James Hamilton’s rival, Sir Hugh Montgomery.
Then in 1722, just two years before he emigrated, Michael Woods was found in deeds to have purchased a house with a large lot in Dundalk in County Louth. This is the county between Down and Armagh in the north and Meath to the south but is much closer to the northern counties. According to tax records, about one generation later, several Woods’ whose names were found earlier in Armagh and Antrim were also in Louth. Dundalk was a significant port then and still is a fishing town and small port today. Again more research is needed on this family. It is also possible that the father of the emigrants was not named John, but Richard, or even William, based on the names and order of them given to the sons of the known and probable emigrant brothers. Michael’s oldest son, for instance was named Archibald, and his second son was apparently Richard, , but Samuel’s oldest was Richard, and sister Sarah who married Davies Stockton also named an older son Richard. The name Richard came into the family from the Fitzsimons/Fitzsimmons family.
In the mid to late 1700’s the names Samuel and Michael appear together again, after the emigrants have left, as lease holders near Trim in County Meath and at Dromore, and they seem to be connected with the northern family just having descendants moving further south.
The Wallace family into whom Elizabeth Woods married was in County Down, Ireland, after 1661, and was established there by a Sir William Wallace, knight, gentleman, third son of the House of Failford, the senior cadet branch of the Earls of Craigie. He was knighted during the Restoration of Charles II as king of England and Scotland, in about 1661 and arrived in Ireland after that. The Cromwellian Grants of 1654 show an additional William Wallace who also received property at this time. Indeed there are two in the wills of the early 1700's, but only one is “knight gentleman.” The fact that Samuel Wallace himself resided in County Down also argues that his Woods’ wife, who was the sister of Michael and Samuel, etc. was from Down, Armagh or Antrim–the three closest counties to where he himself lived. They were married in 1705 or 1706, as the oldest son was born in 1708 and he had one older sister. My late mother employed a professional research company to determine the accuracy of the earliest generations of her family described by George Selden Wallace, after years of research.
Unfortunately, George made a guess as to the name of the father of Peter Wallace who married Martha Woods, as did Worth Ray in another book. Both had ignored the naming tradition so evident in the children and mis-identified Peter’s father, as Peter Wallace Sr.. They both were trying to link the Wallaces of Augusta County to another Wallace family several counties away in eastern Virginia. They don’t link. The earlier line that arrived in 1650 and settled in York County, did not carry the name Peter into the third generation, where George Selden Wallace and Worth Ray needed to have one for their guesses to fit; nor did the York Wallaces move as far west as the family of Peter Wallace and Martha Woods had settled in 1739. The researchers in Ireland determined that Peter’s father was a Samuel and that he was a (younger) son of Sir William Wallace, knight gentleman who had lived and died in County Down after the Restoration, and that William was a younger son of the cadet House of Failford Wallaces. His coat of arms indicates that William was a third son, of the second house (Failford) to the head house, Craigie of the Wallace clan. The Wallaces were a smaller Scottish clan, extremely loyal to the Stewarts, no matter the circumstances, and never achieved the status of Earl. They were Barons. William also held lands/property in Scotland. He was not on Petty’s census of Ireland in 1659, nor was he a Poll Money Ordinance commissioner for County Down in 1660. So this is consistent with the professional researcher’ assertion that he was born in Scotland and arrived in County Down only after the Restoration.
Elizabeth Woods’ husband, Samuel Wallace was born about 1680, and he died just before his family emigrated. They were in the process of emigration when he died The will of Samuel Wallace, as per the PRONI index of wills was dated 1725 but whether this was when it was written or proved is not stated. His widow and children emigrated, along with her brother and his family in 1728. The earliest records in Pennsylvania and Maryland for them are in 1729. . He was also said by descendants to be a sea captain and merchant and may be the Samuel Wallace who made at least six voyages between Liverpool–which had a shipping connection with Newry in County Down–and the Chesapeake Bay and died in 1726, apparently at sea or at his home which was not in Maryland or Virginia. . Children of Samuel Wallace were styled “gentlemen” in the colonial Virginia records, and their oldest, another William, was an officer in the colonial militia. One son of Samuel’s, about the third son, Adam b. 1713, who acquired property and married in Cecil County, Maryland in the mid 1730's, was a mariner, also and enlisted in “Admiral Vernon’s War” also called “The War of Jenkins’ Ear.” He died in a sea battle or assault on the Spanish Caribbean port of Cartagena in 1738. His widowed mother was named by him as executrix of his will and estate. He left a wife, Sarah Graham-Wallace, and a daughter, and property in Cecil County that actually straddled the lines of two colonies and three counties, at the least. His widowed mother was living, probably with a daughter who had married a Woods nephew, in Lancaster County by this time. She had to file administration bonds in four counties in Pennsylvania and Maryland (including the county in which she resided at that time) and yet his will was filed in Cecil County, Maryland. Needless to say the estate administration was “complicated” and a major headache.
Every bond filed also had a fee. The widowed mother of Adam Wallace, Elizabeth Woods- Wallace spent about 100 pounds total to administer her son’s estate, a hefty sum, about a third of a year’s income for an average family at this time. This expensive mess was the result of the dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania over the “Mason-Dixon line.” Both colonies claimed lands on both sides of what finally became the formal border, and thus both required filings, bonds and the like to get anything done.
Samuel Wallace had an older brother, Andrew b. 1672–d. 1754 buried under a massive gravestone at the Head of the Christiana Churchyard near what is now Newark, Delaware. Andrew had arrived and settled on the New Munster Hundred, claimed by Cecil County, Maryland before 1711, and was a founder and elder of the Presbyterian church in the area. He had the only family in several colonies with the same uncommon names as the family of Samuel Wallace who married Elizabeth Woods. Both had sons named William, Andrew and Adam. They are found nowhere else in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, or the Carolinas. Andrew’s son Adam also died in Cecil County, in 1735; his estate was largely administered there, and he was some years older than his first cousin. There also appears to have been another brother to Samuel and Andrew named William, as a William close in age to Andrew arrived with him and settled nearby and was a cofounder of the area church. (Cecil County, Maryland, and Delaware records from two counties, Chester County, Pennsylvania records.)
Additional sons of John Woods and Elizabeth Woods who emigrated were (and this list may not be complete or some are cousins): William, John, Adam, possibly Andrew and James. Another daughter was suspected to be Mary Woods who married Edmond Jeallous, a Cusack descendant, through his mother, and who was buried next to her husband under a fine monument at the old St. Patrick’s churchyard in Trevet, in County Meath (monument seen and described in a gazetteer in 1892). However, Mary is more likely a descendant of the southern branch of the Monaghan-Cavan Woods, some of whom were Kildare, and had lands in Meath. The oldest son of Sir Thomas Woods was a John Woods, Esq., who inherited according to the laws of primogeniture and whose descendants became the Woods of Milverton Hall and Winter Lodge, both in Dublin County. At one point in the 1800's, this Woods family owned over 30,000 acres in several counties in Ireland, and had been High Sheriffs from time to time in both Counties Meath and Dublin. A second son who owned lands in Wicklow and Dublin counties was Thomas Woods, Jr. Esq. (as per the Registry of Deeds and list of Attainted in 1689), Sir Thomas Woods died just before 1689, and his oldest son, not Sir Thomas, was on the list of attainted in 1689. (List of Attainted selected by Catholic Irish parliament of James II which lasted less than two years.)
Children and grandchildren of the inter-related Woods and Wallaces, which themselves already had Campbells in their lines, married with Campbells in Virginia. This is one big extended in-bred family, at least it was so in by the late 1700's. Hopefully there weren’t too many more close-cousin marriages by the 1800's.
Significantly, Gilbert Campbell of Augusta County, Virginia, the one who might really have been a Campbell of “Auchinbreck” had children. One of his daughters married into the Woods. Their descendants are numerous today. Gilbert Campbell himself had 3 sons: James, George and Charles, according to Gilbert’s Augusta County, VA will of August 29, 1750. He also had four daughters, Elizabeth Campbell Woods (wife of Richard Woods, gentleman, who was sheriff of Botetourt County, Virginia in 1770 a few years before his death), Prudence Campbell Hays (wife of Andrew Hays), Sarah and Lettice/Letitia. This is significant, because the title of baronet bypassed Gilbert and his heirs, and went, after the death of the 6th baronet, a son of Gilbert’s oldest surviving brother, to a distant cousin. The American Revolution had occurred by that time and Gilbert’s heirs, had anyone in Scotland or England even remembered them, were no longer eligible for consideration of a UK title. What is puzzling however is why the title didn’t go to a descendant of his younger brother William who had settled in what were still Crown territories in the Caribbean. This suggests the male line of William may have died out by 1814.
Sir James Campbell, 6th Baronet Auchinbreck, Grandson of the 5th Baronet–not son (b. 1721–d. October, 1814 ). He was the only surviving son of the 5th baronet’s oldest son, Duncan, (1697 to about 1722) and one older sister, Janet. . There is very little about Duncan’s life, except for his marriage to Jean Clerk, “daughter of Alexander Clerk of Glendoick” which probably occurred in 1718 when Duncan would have been just 21. There is not even a death date recorded for him for Duncan. Duncan Campbell, oldest son of James, 5th baronet Auchinbreck, married Jean Clerk, daughter of Alexander Clerk of Glendoick, Perthshire, and there is nothing certain thus far found about either a birth or death year for her and why she had no children past her son James and a daughter Janet except the general statement that her husband died about the time of the birth of his son, or shortly after. Did she remarry? We don’t know.. Nothing is written in the Clan Campbell histories about Duncan, except to say he predeceased his father. His only surviving son, James, who became the 6th and last Baronet of his line, has only an estimated birth year in Burke’s peerage or any other published book, “ born in 1721,” though he is at least credited with a death date. Again, this is not precise. One puzzle is why didn’t Duncan witness and sign the marriage papers for his cousin Archibald Campbell of Strondour instead of his younger brother, James? Was Duncan ill? Why didn’t Duncan marry the heiress sister to John Campbell, who was Thane of Cawdor by 1717? This would have helped the Campbells of Auchinbreck financially, and kept the money out of the hands of the irresponsible, scheming father. He might not have been able to support the “little rising” of 1719 or rebellion in 1745.
Sir Duncan Campbell, 4th baronet, and his son Sir James Campbell, 5th baronet were not estate managers. They tried to be political or military leaders and spent little time developing the economies of their estates. Duncan Campbell began as a wealthy young man, though his grandfather had already loaned about 30,000 pounds to the Marquess of Argyll for use in fighting Montrose in the first round of civil wars between a Stuart king and Covenanters. It was not fully repaid. The “government” did repay about 10,000 pounds to Auchinbreck, but Argyll himself repaid nothing. At this time, though, the loss did not greatly diminish the wealth of the Campbells of Auchinbreck. The third and fourth baronets then made some additional smaller loans to neighbors and merchants that were repaid with interest and the third took an active interest in the agrarian production of his estates. He died trying to help put out the fire in his own home. The fourth baronet was raised largely by his mother, and with the help of an Earl of Argyll more prone to scheme and spend than manage his own estates, much less able to teach someone else to manage his estates.
In 1685, the 9th Earl again called upon Auchinbreck for a loan for warfare, rebellion that he had chosen to join and attempt to lead. This time the amount was 30,000 pounds and in addition to that, Auchinbreck was required to be the colonel of arms in the rebellion and equip his own men. It was a colossal loss. The loan again was not repaid by the House of Argyll, and the Auchinbreck estates had been pillaged and ruined between 1685-89. They had begun to recover when the 4th baronet died and left an only son who himself was not well trained to manage estates and had his own political dreams.
However, the 5th baronet was not ruined yet, and even after 1715 and the fines were paid for his participation in that rebellion, he still could, and did, loan money to the uncle of the new Thane of Cawdor for remodeling the castle of Cawdor at Nairn. In this loan, the Auchinbrecks were luckier than with almost any made to the Earls and Marchioness of Argyll. The loan was eventually repaid with interest. However, it was not enough to offset growing debts of the 5th baronet. “After the Act of Union, some nobles and laird tried to make their lands more prosperous with trade and agricultural cooperatives, and mining, including Argyll and to a lesser extent, Auchinbreck. However, many estates ultimately failed and were partly or completely sold off. The estates of Auchinbreck were already sequestered first in 1739, then redeemed and then again sequestered in 1746 and again in 1752 for the last time. Economic conditions were made worse throughout Scotland when, after the failed 1745 rebellion, Cumberland swept through a large swath of Scotland with fire and sword, and again survivors were transported to the American colonies, further depopulating the country. Many Campbell estates were bankrupted and sold after 1745. It was simply that one of the earliest and largest estates to go was that of Auchinbreck. Few nobles or other “gentlemen” in Scotland, or even England, at that time were educated about estate management or gave much thought to it. They were better trained in war or law for the most part, or even theology. The Wallaces of Failford and the Campbells of Skeldon in Ireland were the exceptions to the rule, perhaps because they had so little land or other means with which to begin to develop themselves and their families.
Bad loans to the nobles of the House of Argyll, were not the only reason, the estates were sequestered to pay off debts in 1752. Some estates had been confiscated after Sir James Campbell, 5th Baronet Auchinbreck had been found to have been involved in the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. Sir James Campbell, Baronet of Auchinbreck had been one of the “sept seigneurs ecossals” who had signed the assurance to Cardinal Fleury that Scotland would rise in support of a Franco-Jacobite invasion, which induced Charles Edward Stuart “Bonnie Prince Charlie” to come to Scotland and try to take the throne of England and Scotland with disastrous results. “In written communication with Auchinbreck was Dugald MacTavish, the younger of Dunardy, and treasonable correspondence was found to exist between the two men in 1745.” An arrest warrant was given out for the two men and of Auchinbreck it was written that “his person was seized at his home at Lochgair, in November 1745 and he was handed over to the Deputy Governor of Dumbarton Castle who promised to treat him with all possible civility” where he was imprisoned for about a year. In April, 1746, he was said “to be in a starving condition.” “Too old and futile to be regarded as dangerous” he was ultimately released before the end of 1746. His correspondent in the Jacobite plots, Dugald MacTavish, was also imprisoned and finally released in the king’s general pardon of 1747–after the king had executed a few others, such as the Earl of Radcliffe. (Quotes from the official MacFarlane Clan genealogies, of MacFarlane and Associate Clans)
It could not go on, and in 1762 Sir James Campbell the 6th Baronet, who inherited the title and a pile of debts and nothing but sequestered lands then sold them off; the sum realised still did not cover his debts.” ( A History of Clan Campbell: From the Restoration to the Present Day, by Alastair Campbell, Vol. 3, printed in 2004, reprinted in 2006, Edinburgh University Press)
By 1762, his grandson, Sir James Campbell, 6th Baronet was virtually ruined, left with next to nothing and little, if anything more, was heard of him until he died in October, 1814. He was a Captain in the 49th Regiment of Foot some time after 1751, but did not serve in the American War of Independence, when this unit was on the opposing side of what would have been some kinsmen at Brandywine Creek in 1777. He is said to have married, but nothing is known of his wife, and he had no sons. This is where the first line of the Baronets of Auchinbreck ended. It was several years before a senior male relative among the next cadet houses, who still lived in the UK, or its territories or colonies, could be identified and offered little more than a mere title of almost nothing. The line moved to New Zealand shortly after it was given to the next person–descended from the third laird–not even from any of the Baronets. There is no evidence that the records of the first six baronets traveled with him. There would have been no reason for this. If they were not destroyed, then it is likely they will turn up in the cellar of some government building where they have reposed since either 1762 or 1802, or they will eventually be discovered among some forgotten container of Argyll papers at Inveraray, since the first estates and feudal obligations had originally come from Argyll.
G. Harvey Johnston noted in his book, The Heraldry of the Campbells, a number of lines of Campbells who ended up in the Caribbean, particularly Jamaica. Most of them come from cadet houses to Kilmory, cadet to Auchinbreck. However, one younger son of the 5th baronet is also stated in court records to have gone to Jamaica, William. A second is believed to have gone to Jamaica and died there unmarried, Alexander. Again, belief, no documentation has yet been shown for this story. He could have wound up in Virginia for all we know, or the Carolinas. Finally, there is one oddity.
Now there was believed at one point to be yet another line of related emigrants to Virginia. James Campbell, 5th baronet, had a distant cousin through another cadet line to Kilmory, named “John Campbell of Virginia and Jamaica.” According to the Claiborne family Bible and other records, “Col. William Claiborne, Esq., gentleman acquired land in Northumberland County, Virginia, between 1652-1657. (Prior to that) his father, also named William, “first acquired lands near Elizabeth City in 1626.” William Claiborne Jr. was the son of William Claiborne Sr. and his first wife, Jane, apparently Butler (originally Boteler). William Claiborne Jr., Esq., married Martha____ and “had issue: Katherine who married John Campbell of Inveraray, Argyllshire, of the House of Auchinbreck (Katherine died in 1715 at the age of 34 years and had children), Elizabeth, and sons, William, Thomas, and Leonard Claiborne. Katherine Claiborne Campbell was born in 1681, as one of the youngest, if not the youngest, of William Claiborne, Esq’s, children, and married to John Campbell about 1702. She had four surviving children by her husband and then “died in 1715 at the age of 34.” John Campbell was born about 1677. What the Claibornes don’t say but is in G. Harvey Johnston’s book The Heraldry of the Campbells is that John Campbell and his wife Katherine Claiborne did not remain in Virginia. This couple moved to Jamaica where they have descendants to this day. There is no evidence that any of the children of this couple ever decided to leave Jamaica and try their luck in Virginia again. However, after slavery ended in the 1800's a number of Scottish descent families who were in Jamaica did emigrate to the southern U.S.. It’s possible that there are other descendants of the extended Auchinbreck and cadet lines that did eventually end up in the U.S., at a later time, just probably not in Virginia at that point. The land there was getting depleted of nutrients and the original Virginia settlers were themselves leaving.
Who ARE All THESE Campbells?
Although the greatest concentration of Campbells in Virginia was in the central Shenandoah Valley, there were other Campbells in Virginia by the 1740’s, some of whom had known origins and were also significant. The following is from 50 years of notes from published and online records, some of which have only recently become available, several books and other publications, some of which are still in print and only excerpts of which may be copied and used here under “fair use” laws. Their authors are acknowledged.
Andrew Campbell b. Ca 1700-10, place unknown as yet, of Frederick County, Virginia, had been living in the county for several years when he petitioned to be allowed to set up an ordinary in 1744. He was acquainted with George Washington and Lord Fairfax. The former mentions staying at his place on a trip to the mountains when he was still a surveyor. He was called “Major Campbell,” and had become the third sheriff of the county, one of its first justices and was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses from 1744-47. However, he was one of the vestrymen in a corrupt vestry in Frederick County that was dissolved in 1752 by the House of Burgesses because it had appropriated about 1200 pounds for the purpose of building churches and had not built them, and could give no good accounting of how the money was spent. It was believed that much had been pocketed by the vestrymen themselves. As a result of the shame and scandal, Andrew and his family then “went to (North) Carolina.” However, he also did so during the French and Indian War when this part of the valley was hard hit by the native allies so it’s still an open question as to whether or not he was actually one of the corrupt vestrymen since in so much of his life otherwise, he was described as “puritanical” in his beliefs and behavior.
Was Andrew a brother or the son of Dugall (Dugald) Campbell who wrote a will in Frederick County in 1767, proved in 1771 when he died, that named his oldest son as “Andrew,” and never said he was out of the state but instead implied he was still in Virginia and had a family with a son of his own named Andrew. Clearly from this will, Dugald, again whose origins are not known, had grandchildren and was elderly, but how elderly? It’s more likely Dugald was a brother to Andrew, but it’s not a certainty. From ‘Dugall Campbell’s” will, his surviving children were: Andrew, who already had a son named Andrew, Robert described as “of age”, and two daughters, Mary and Frances who were not quite yet of age. His wife was also named Frances and was named executrix of his will. The will was proved in Berkeley County, on May 19, 1771. Berkeley County had just been carved from Frederick County at that time.
Many descendants claim Dugald was a son of a brother of John Campbell of Augusta County who had been born in 1674. Additionally, at least one Andrew Campbell was associated with an Alexander Campbell in a record in Augusta County in 1764. Then to add to this confusion, an Alexander and Daniel Campbell were together in King George County in 1750, but mentioned in Chalkley’s suggesting Alexander had moved from King George County westward to Augusta sometime between 1750 and 1764. The same duo are mentioned in a will dated 1761 by Richard Burdine in Culpeper County in which Richard bequeaths land to his son John that adjoins the lands of these two Campbells.
However, in 1751 there was a record of an Alexander Campbell living next to a William Campbell on “Beverly Manor,” in the northern part of Augusta County which later became Rockingham County. This Alexander Campbell was also described as a “wheelwright” besides a land-owner. Do the records refer to one or two Alexander Campbell’s and was he father or brother to an Andrew and Daniel? Unfortunately, Chalkley’s Chronicles are only abstracts of records and one can only hope an examination of the full records would shed more light on the relationships.
A May 20, 1752 deed in Augusta County lays out relationships of an Alexander Campbell living in Beverly Manor as his land adjoins several of his relatives including: brothers Robert and David and father William. A 1771 record refers to this same group and an additional brother, John. The properties are also along the “line of James Moffet.” This is most likely the same Alexander Campbell, wheelwright and planter who lived next to Wiiliam Campbell in the 1751 record.
From “Cavaliers and Pioneers: Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents and Grants” published in 1979, an Alexander Campbell arrived in Virginia in 1713. He settled in Isle of Wight County where he witnessed a will for Benjamin Jordan there in 1715.
Then “in 1725, Anglican minister Rev. Alexander Campbell was sent to Virginia on the king’s bounty.” (from “A List of Emigrant Ministers to America” by Gerald Fothergill, 1904, London.
A very intriguing family is one that was in Prince Edward County and then moved to Rockbridge County and could be closely related to one or another county that was in Augusta County earlie. This is the family of Robert Campbell who by a couple of only partly documented accounts was born in 1718 in County Down, Ireland. He originally came to South Caroiina, “as a child” with his father and (siblings?) Colin, William, Archibald and Catherine Campbell but Robert was then found living in Prince Edward County in 1725. Robert’s father was not named, but said to have died at sea during the voyage. Robert’s son, Robert Jr. wa+s born in Prince Edward County, in 1759 as per his Revolutionary War application. Robert “Sr.” married his wife, Letitia Crockett in Prince Edward County and when she died he married his second wife, Jane Allison, in the same county, as per Crockett genealogies, and a family history compiled by Rev. Charles W, Campbell of Vandalia, Missouri. He moved to Rockbridge County, Virginia by 1786 and then owned land in “Carter’s Valley” in what became Washington County and later Hawkins County, Tennessee. He hadn’t moved from Carter’s Valley, the county lines did. From the dates on his last known records, he died in Hawkins County, Tennessee, about 1810. This Robert Campbell married Letitia Crockett about 1740 in Prince Edward County and had the following children: Anna, Jane, Elizabeth, James, Catherine and Alexander; by his second wife, Jane Allison he had children: Robert b. 1759, Joseph, Letitia, and Isaac Andrew b. 1765, killed by natives (allies of the British) soon after coming to Rockbridge County before 1785.
Next i s Lt. Col. Richard Campbell, b. 1730-35, probably in Virginia, a Revolutionary War hero who died at the battle of Eutaw Springs Sept. 8, 1781. His lands were in Shenandoah County, next to Frederick. He left a will dated Sept. 22, 1778 and named his wife, Rebecca (Hawkins), and children: Archibald (oldest son, died without issue before 1799), Joseph (married Jane Hill), John (ended up principal heir, was an adult by 1790), Richard Jr. (also died relatively young) and Jonathan. He left an estate that included 6,000 acres for his heirs. It is possible Richard’s father’s name was Archibald, based on the usual naming tradition followed by some three quarters or more of Scots and Scots Irish at that time. Since he had minor sons at the time, and his oldest was not said to be married, though his oldest was of age, it is reasonable to estimate that Richard was born about 1730 or so. His pension application was filed by his heirs in the 1790’s for the land award due his service. The heirs were awarded 1100 acres as a result. Testimony in this and other cases identified his wife and a probable brother of hers, Benjamin Hawkins, and the wife of son, Joseph. Again, though, who was his father and grandfather and from where did the grandfather or great-grandfather emigrate? A Lt. Col, Revolutionary War hero with 6,000 acres is not an insignificant person to have as an ancestor. Shenandoah County was carved from Frederick County in 1772, and both were originally part of Orange County. Since Shenandoah County was once part of Frederick County, was Richard part of the Dugald and Andrew and other unknown brothers Campbell family?
According to enlistment records for the “French and Indian War” in about 1756 on the muster rolls was a John Campbell, planter, born in Scotland, aged 31 who lived at or near Alexandria and served under Major Andrew Lewis.
In the biography and other materials about Gilbert Campbell of Westmoreland County it is stated he was not the first Campbell in that county, in 1765, that Archibald and Colin Campbell were in Westmoreland County, before Gilbert Campbell. Archibald still resided in the county at that time. It was said that Gilbert was somehow a kinsman to the two, but not substantiated with any documentation, or even a precise relationship. In 1782, a John Campbell in Westmoreland County was on the tax rolls as an owner of six slaves, and also Archibald Campbell with 8 slaves. Gilbert died before this mid-year roll was taken (as per his nuncupative will and administration records).
There is a biography and data on Archibald Campbell of Westmoreland County in Early Campbell Emigrants to Virginia by William Glover Stanard in 1911. “Rev. Archibald Campbell in Virginia by 1754 in Westmoreland County, was a son of Archibald Campbell of Kirnan, Argyllshire, Scotland and his wife, Anna Stewart of Ascog… Alexander Campbell (1710-1801), of Falmouth, brother of Archibald Campbell, preceding, returned to Scotland where he became the father of Thomas Campbell,, the Poet.” this data cited verbatim by Stanard was from an article about the family in the “Richmond Standard” in two segments April 12 and May 3, 1879. Archibald did have children and grandchildren, and may have descendants in the U.S. to the present day (2022). At least one Campbell line, then has a firm link back to a particular place in Scotland.
There were Campbells in King and Queen County, as a John Campbell, aged 38, born in King and Queen County, enlisted and served in Captain Nathaniel Welch’s company (patriots) in the Revolution in 1777. He would have been born about 1739. On the Virginia Quit Rents roll of 1704 was Alexander “Cammell.”
Nansemond County, Virginia, had a John Campbell owner of 400 acres on its “quit rent rolls” in 1704. He was a son of Capt. Hugh Campbell, Esq. of Cessnock who acquired lands in Nansemond County between 1689-91, and also resided in this county in 1698 as the head of the only Campbell family then in that county. See his biography below.
Spotsylvania County had Alexander Campbell already of age in 1750 when he witnessed a will, and in other wills his wife was identified as Mary, sister of Ann Dansie a widow who left a will in 1782 and Mary herself left a will naming son, Alexander and “son” John Spotswood (probably son in law) and witnesses included John and Susanna C. Spotswood, implying Mary’s daughter was Susanna Campbell Spotswood. A Colling (Colin?) Campbell died in this same county before 1760 and could have been the father of Alexander. (Abstract mentions “Colling’s estate administration was in the county’s Will Book A. Spotsylvania County was established in 1721, and named for an early Virginia governor by the name of Spotswood. Thus this Campbell family did well for itself having had a daughter marry into the wealthy family of a colonial governor, appointed by the Crown. Ann Dansie, by the way, was Ann Dandridge who married Thomas Dansie and therefore a relative of George Washington’s wife. In her will she identified her brother, William Dandridge and his son Francis Dandridge and her “nephew” Alexander Spotswoodr (states that Alexander’s mother was Ann’s sister Mary, who married Alexander Campbell, suggesting Alexander Spotswood was actually a great-nephew). It means, though, that Mary Campbell was also a Dandridge by birth.
Culpeper County had Alexander Ellick (?) Campbell born 15 October, 1759 to Charles and Ellender Campbell, who married Margaret Williams of Fairfax County b. 1774/5 (could be his second wife), married in Chatham County, North Carolina, and then moved to what became Anderson County, Tennessee where he was a member of the Lost Creek Meeting House. He had the following known children: Elizabeth b. 18 August, 1776, Rachel, Ellic(k), Owen, Margaret, Elender, William (b. 1785 in Randolph County, NC), Mary, Alexander, Rachel (the 2nd–the first died as a child), Nancy and twins Levi and Eli (born in 1799). This family actually has some records but none are cited by the person who identified himself or herself solely as “My Kindred” on a website in 2005.
The parents of Alexander Ellick Campbell may not be state accurately by their descendants as a will was found in Shenandoah County for an Alexander Campbell, dated 27 December, 1783 and proved in that county 26 January, 1786 and identified wife, Lettice, son(s) Alexander, Ellick and daughter Letty Campbell. Witnesses were Joseph Covill Vance, Bridget Wilson and Lettice Campbell.
What is odd is that a list of marriage records for Culpeper County, Virginia shows a number of Campbell marriages in the 1780’s and 1790’s that includes an Owen Campbell who married Jemima Lear in 1787 and a William Campbell who married Anne Howard in 1800. Were these two, and others related to Alexander?
Alexander Ellick Campbell may be a brother, son, or nephew of Percival Adam Campbell who was stated to have been born 30 August, 1735 at Dunblane, Stirlingshire, in Scotland and then claimed to have been a son of Patrick Campbell born in 1696 in Ireland and Lettice Taylor–with no substantiation of any of this. The story goes on to say that Percival Adam Campbell married Sarah Elizabeth “Bettie” Morgan who was born January, 1740 in either Ireland or Culpeper County, Virginia and that they were married in 1755 in either Culpeper County, Virginia or Wilkes County, North Carolina. She was identified (how is not stated) as a daughter of Theophilus Morgan, Sr. Percival Adam Campbell is given a death date of February, 1798, Union Grove, Rowan (now Iredell) County, North Carolina where there is a Campbell cemetery with some of his children interred there. Others went to Illinois and Indiana. The oldest son of Percival Adam Campbell was identified in this account as William R. Campbell born 1 August, 1756.in Culpeper County who then died 12 January, 1840 in Bureau County, Illinois. From the precise dates of a number of his children and the cemetery with inscriptions that still exists it is clear the creator of this account had some records, but again it’s left to readers to double check everything to see what all the documentation actually is and how well it links the generations.
Yet another Culpeper Campbell was John Campbell who died in Culpeper County, Virginia in 1780 and left a will probated March 20, 1780, an estate inventory and appraisal of the same year, but the online abstract did not identify heirs. The material is in Will Book B, Culpeper County (1780-83) pages 364-5, and page 386.,
The Culpeper County Campbells may be related to Campbells in Fauquier County, Virginia, which neighbors Culpeper County. It has been thought that the Owen Campbell who married Jemima Lear in Culpeper County in 1787 was previously married to Mary E. “Bettie” Settle on 15 January, 1772 in Fauquier County. Unfortunately, though Owen is not a common name, there were two, as the name Owen Campbell was on the 1810 census for both Culpeper County, and the one who married in Fauquier County was in Madison County, Alabama in 1810 when his daughter, Lucy married there 26 July, 1810. His will was administered in that county in 1824. In the 1800’s most censes were taken starting in mid to late spring when it was warmer and the land had begun to dry out a bit and the roads were less of a mess. However, it is possible the two men were related, cousins or uncle and nephew., and have a common grandfather.
From “Caroline County marriages:” William Campbell married Susannah Burry (Berry?) 24 January 1712 (or 1713 based on use of the old calendar); marriage performed by Rev. William Guirey (?) Another researcher found some materials from a book on “Caroline County, Virginia” written by T.E. Campbell who had been researching what remained of Caroline County records for some of his own ancestry and transcribed a number of records: In a list of estates and administrators: 1738 Robert Campbell died and Robert Tompkins was his executor; in 1749 George Campbell died, executor James Campbell; 1750 Sarah Campbell died, executor Willam Campbell; 1753 William Campbell died, executor George Campbell Jr.. From civil court records 1732-4, William Campbell a freeholder, registered one slave; and in 1747 William Campbell was indedbted to store owner Josiah B___ for 9 pence. In 1765, William Campbell, a small planter was granted a judgment against John “Hoames” of Bowling Green. (The last record is for a younger William Campbell as an older one died in 1753.)
From other records , Joseph Campbell was born in 1745 (actually closer to 1740) in Virginia and “came to Caroline County” prior to 1761 and married Elizabeth Peatross, daughter of Matthew Peatross in 1761 or so. His first son Matthew was born in 1764. Joseph built the estate called “Poplar Grove” and a home that was still standing in 1959. He died suddenly in November, 1794 and his oldest son, Matthew was named administrator/executor of Joseph’s estate by the county court, Dec. 9, 1794. Joseph’s Campbell’s children were: Matthew, Elizabeth, Jane, Amey, Nancy Ann, Joseph Jr., Sarah, William, Zaccheus, Dorothea, Elliott Peatross Campbell. All of his children’s names, save his own, seem to be connected to the Peatross family as his father in law was Matthew Peatross, his mother in law was named Amey, his wife was named Elizabeth, and he had a brother in law named William Peatross. Family history researchers for this family have used DNA tests that show he was related to a Whittaker Campbell and descended from an Alexander Campbell but they didn’t say WHICH Alexander Campbell of which county.
In Brunswick County, Robert Campbell was marw# ried to Mary Neal, 19 February, 1752.
In Lunenburg County was a 1758 road building order in which Angus Campbell and others were to build a road under surveyor Jacob Roberson and later the same year, James Campbell fulfilled another such order.
From David Dobson’s compilation of records he found and published in Scots on the Chesapeake which has some of the earliest records of Scots arriving in Virginia are the following names.
Alexander Campbell, a tailor in Glasgow shipped to the Potomac River of Virginia on the “American Merchant” in 1714. (TM202)
Rev. Archibald Campbell, son of Alexander Campbell and Margaret Stewart was a resident of Kirnan, Kilmichael, Argyllshire, as a clergyman and educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen 1739-45 shipped to Virginia but later lived in Wilmington County (area) in North Carolina 1754-74. (EMA 18) (SCM12.9) (SEV20). Note this is the same area where a ship called “the Thistle” commissioned by MacAllisters brought “5 Scots Gentlemen and their families and 90 poor families” mostly from Kintyre, Mull and Islay in 1739 and this group included unnamed Campbells. This information seems to duplicate information about the Rev. Archibald Campbell of Westmoreland County, Virginia but nothing was said in his other biography that he went to Wilmington, North Carolina According to researchers in Westmoreland County, he was still in Westmoreland County, Virginia when customs controller Gilbert Campbell arrived in 1765 and for some years after. He had also been in Westmoreland for “some years” before Gilbert Campbell arrived. Archibald Campbell was also on tax rolls for Westmoreland County. It’s possible “Wilmington” is an error and should have been “Westmoreland” in this instance.
Charles Campbell, merchant, resident of Ayr (town in Ayrshire), settled in Virginia prior to 1752 (SRO.CS16.1.99)
Capt. Hugh Campbell, Esq. son of Sir Hugh Campbell of Cessnock (Ayrshire) shipped first to Bermuda in 1677 (maybe 1679 as per “Jardine’s Martyrs”) (was transported as a Covenanter and sentenced to 5 or 7 years of indenture, completed in 1685 when he chose to leave Bermuda for Virginia), settled in Norfolk, Virginia by 1687. (BS.28). He was the younger son of Sir Hugh Campbell of Cessnock who died, after many years of persecutions, 20th September, 1686, “at the age of 71” (Johnston, Heradlry of the Campbells. Sir Hugh was thus born in March, 1615. Sir Hugh married Elizabeth Campbell, younger daughter of “the Master of Loudon” and co-heiress with her older sister Margaret to Loudon estates of Benderloch in Argyllshire, and estates in Ayrshire. Margaret’s husband, John Campbell of Lawers became first Earl of Loudon. Elizabeth was born about 1610 as her father died in 1612 with no further issue. Sir Hugh Campbell of Cessnock married Elizabeth some time in the 1630’s and was M.P. of Ayrshire in the Scottish parliament beginning in 1639 until 1649. In 1649 he acquired a large parcel of land, including Riccarton, from Sir Hugh Wallace, baron of Craigie and his heir Hugh Wallace of Craigie, that they were selling off to pay debts. Sir Hugh Wallace then reneged on the transaction and Sir Hugh Campbell of Cessnock had to “supplicate” in court for acknowledgement of the agreement and delivery of the land, which he won. His brother-in-law, John Campbell, Earl of Loudon was a justice in this matter. His oldest son and heir was George Campbell who died in 1704, and his second son, Captain Hugh Campbell, Esq. “Jardine’s Martyrs” citing lists of men convicted of being “Covenanters” between 1679 and 1683 lists Sir Hugh Campbell of Cessnock, his heir George and his second son Captain Hugh Campbell among those required to forfeit.
Captain Hugh Campbell, Esq. was born at Cessnock, Galston, Ayrshire, Scotland, in the late 1630’s possibly as late 1740 or so and definitely was arrested for being a “Covenanter,” a Scots Presbyterian who refused to acknowledge the Church of England, Scotland and Ireland as state church, and the king as head of church, and accept the rule of bishops appointed by the king as religious–and government authorities. He was sentenced to transport in either 1677 or 1679 and was shipped to Bermuda accordingly. He was released upon the death of King Charles II in 1685, and left Bermuda for Virginia. He apparently was well treated despite his sentence and made friends in Bermuda and continued to do business with the island. His son, Alexander married into a “wealthy Bermuda trading family.”. Captain Hugh Campbell, Esq. of Cessnock then acquired land in Norfolk, Princess Anne, Isle of Wight and Nansemond Counties, died in Nansemond County and left a will which was destroyed when county records were later “lost” but part of the administration records remained. In 1689, 1690 and 1691 he acquired 3 parcels of land totalling 1515 acres “at the head of the South Branch of the Elizabeth River” in “Lower Norfolk” which became part of Nansemond County “for himself and the importation of 5 persons” (usually family persons in this context). (from a record found by Barnes family researchers as the three parcels of land that Hugh acquired had been first patented by a Barnes a few years prior, then “deserted” allowing it to be patented by Hugh.) In 1691 he then made a gift of land of 200 acres in each county: Norfolk, Isle of Wight and Nansemond for the religious education of youth in those counties. (College of Virginia and Mary Quarterly, 1898 vol. 6) He was a practicing attorney and was a jury foreman in several important cases. He is in a court record in a debt dispute in 1693 in Isle of Wight County where he lost the dispute against the Ward family and in 1698 he won a judgment in Nansemond County against Edward Bass who owed him 500 pounds of tobacco as debt payment. He was a merchant and while not generally a slave trader was recorded as transporting one “native” slave from Bermuda to Virginia at the request of an individual who paid him for this. In 1696 he was mentioned in a deed as living along Chuckatuck Creek in Nansemond County. He died between 1704 and 1707, and had children, at least two sons named John and Alexander. Another record identifies a third, youngest son, named William.
On the 1704 Virginia Quit Rent rolls was Capt. Hugh Campbell in Princess Anne County (where others reported he had acquired land) and (sons) John and Alexander Campbell were in Nansemond County, where Hugh had patented land and practiced law. These were the only Campbells in the area at that time and he had imported to his property that became Nansemond County five persons besides himself, as per earlier records. As per a 1689 deed found by a Lewis family researcher, John Campbell had a brother, William Campbell to whom he sold 100 acres in 1689 that John had purchased in 1687 from Richard Lewis. John and William were described as living in “Chuckatuck Parish,” in Nansemond County. Alexander Campbell continued to own land and reside in the county until at least 1716 as per what remains of records of this county. Alexander Campbell, also of Chuckatuck parish sold either 100 or 200 acres to Robert Driver in 1716, that Alexander had first acquired of Miles and Richard Lewis who had the land since 1667 before selling it to Alexander Campbell in 1687(?). In 1735 and 1736, John and Alexander Campbell witnessed deeds of Richard Vick for sales of land along “Pattycasey” Creek in Nansemond County. In April, 1748, John Campbell of Nansemond County (a grandson, son John died before 1746) and Mills Riddick witnessed a deed between Jotham Lacciter and Moses Riddick. Court records show two additional, later John Campbell’s, through the second half of the 18th century and into the mid-19th century where one John Campbell was a plaintiff in an 1837-40 case that went to the state Supreme Court regarding rights of slaves and when they and offspring are emancipated or not. . A June 12, 1748 deed clearly links members of the family. Robert Campbell sold 419 acres of land to James Baker; land described as on east side of Blackwater Swamp and on Currawaugh Swamp that included 411 acres that had been patented in 1695 by Hugh Campbell and willed this land to his son John, deceased, father of Robert (the seller).
From a PhD dissertation on the early “merchant-magistrates of Virginia,” came additional information. Alexander Campbell married into a “merchant trading family of Bermuda” (where his father had been between 1677-1685). It is clear that Capt. Hugh Campbell of Cessnock, Esq. attorney, merchant, sea captain and planter, died between 1704-1707, had three sons: Alexander, John (d. 1740’s) and William. Some of his children or grandchildren may be among those in Brunswick and Lunenburg Counties. This is plausible because my other research into other lines of my late mother’s family, shows this was precisely the route of westward migration for persons from Isle of Wight and Nansemond counties with expanding families and land being depleted from the agricultural practices common in that day. However, it is clear from the existing court records and deeds that members of the family also continued to reside in the county for nearly 200 years from the late 1600’s to at least 1850.
According to several account, Sir Hugh Campbell of Cessnock suffered decades of persecution for their religious beliefs and were unfairly accused of being involved in several plots against King Charles II, including the “Rye House Plot.” They were tried and the courts found that the king’s accusation and case against them were unproven, yet, the King’s council and parliament imprisoned them twice after the courts acquitted them. Sir Hugh Campbell of Cessnock spent more of his last two years of life in prison, in cold, damp, miserable conditions than he did out of prison and the terrible conditions were believed to have hastened his death. At the end, his last trial was not even public, and yet, again he was imprisoned and his lands and the rights of his oldest son and heir were declared forfeit–that much was public..
In 1685, King James II had convened a secret “star chamber” hearing in which Sir Hugh was not informed, not permitted to attend, nor have defense, nor know of what he was accused or who accused him. This incident is one of the major reasons why the Virginians insisted upon clear rules of justice in the U.S. Constitution including no imprisonment without conviction, a fair hearing where the accused is present has defense and knows who his accusers are and no seizure of life or property without a fair, open and lawful hearing. The fourth and sixth amendments to the U.S. Constitution is partly based upon what happened to the Campbells of Cessnock, and later to Campbells in Norfolk, Virginia not quite 80 years later, including Captain Hugh Campbell’s son or grandson, Alexander who was appalled enough at the events in Norfolk to leave the area for a region of Norfolk County that Hugh and his sons had already helped to make a separate county, Nansemond. . These were not the only such instances, but the Scots had been used to a much more fair and transparent legal and judicial system before the Stuart kings also became kings of England and subordinated or even ignored Scottish law and rules of procedure in favor of the English system which at the time gave the king, his privy council and Parliament far more authority allowing them to be capricious and have little or no accountability.
After the death of his father, Sir George Campbell of Cessnock and Galston, in Ayrshire, who as heir had been dispossessed at the same time as his dying father in 1685, had to wait until 1691 when William of Orange was on the throne to see his estates, title, privileges and rights restored to him. It’s hard to say given all the times James II had the family and estate papers confiscated, looking for excuses to imprison the Campbells of Cessnock and take their lands, if all were finally returned 6 years after the last such seizure in 1691. Certainly the contributors to Burke’s Peerage never realized that George, for instance, had a younger brother, or who all George’s children were, when they were allegedly compiling genealogies in the 18th and 19th centuries.
From the dissertation on “Merchant-Magistrates of Virginia) in 1991, comes the second horror story of incredible injustices to Campbells. Archibald Campbell, born in Scotland, arrived in 1744 in Norfolk as a physician and in the 1760’s, still a resident of that town, began to engage in commerce. In 1755, Archibald and James Campbell expressed resentment at discrimination against Scots emigrants and their denial of being on the “borough bench,” when Richard Scott’s slave was elected MAYOR of the borough. The discrimination of the town’s founders had been directed at Scots more generally, but also specifically against both English and Scots merchants. Dr. Archibald Campbell further enraged the local long-time Norfolk leaders when he and mostly some other Scots agreed to have a friend of Archibald Campbell, Dr. John Dalgleish, innoculate their families against smallpox in the 1760’s. (a case of some of the fist anti-vaxxers?). Many, though not all, of the long-time civic leaders (old families going back to the earliest history of the area) considered smallpox a natural consequence of people living closely together in towns such as theirs and those who accepted inoculation to be “upsetting the natural order.” When initial plans to innoculate a group of mostly Scots merchants at a particular house fell through, due to the opposition, Archibald Campbell volunteered his own home on Tanner Creek about 3 miles outside the “borough” of Norfolk. According to the Virginia Gazette on 25 August, 1768, riots by persons against vaccination broke out in Norfolk, as they had done a month before in York County and there were three groups involved: those who believed vaccination was against the natural order, those who were afraid that vaccination would cause the illness, not prevent it, and those who believed Campbell and Dalgleish and their friends intended to use vaccination solely to profit themselves. When Archibald Campbell allowed vaccinations at his house, a mob led by Joseph Calvert then attacked the house and took all those vaccinated to the “pesthouse” though it had not been made ready yet as was expected by a compromise worked out by his own kinsmen with Campbell and Dalgleish and others on foot in a driving thunderstorm, to the “pesthouse” miles away. The terrified unfortunates included women and children, and some did become ill, though not with smallpox. Then 2 days later the mob returned and burned Archibald Campbell’s home to the ground. (June 25-28, 1768). Campbell blamed Samuel “Boush” (Bush) and Joseph Calvert. The city officials finally took action against a number of the rioters, but never identified all the leaders of the riots nor the leaders of the mob that burned Campell’s house. Civil suits dragged on back and forth for years and Archibald Campbell never really received justice.
Another Campbell in the same area was Donald Campbel who with the backing of the area’s Scottish merchants built a large leatherworks and tanyard in the 1760’s that grew to eventually include a rope-works using hemp,the whole being called “Donald Campbell and Company.” Donald also chafed at the treatment of Scots and businesspersons but was not personally a target of the riots of 1768. Because of the messy, odiferous, dirty, nature of so much of his company’s work, his operations were mostly just outside the town proper where he would have less involvement with the town government and instead the more reasonable, if limited, county government.
After 1768, Archibald Campbell remained in the area and tried to stay neutral as the Revolution loomed, even earning a reprimand from General Howe for trading with Massachusetts but eventually fled to Bermuda in 1775 to avoid the conflict. The hotheads who had burned his house and rioted had also rioted against the Stamp Act and were more than ready to engage in other violence. At the same time, the king had finally sent troops to the colonies and Lord Dunmore had a firmer hand on Virginia than his predecessors–until Dunmore made the mistake of betraying the frontier militia to the Shawnee and supplied arms to both while promoting a battle between both, apparently with the idea of having the two groups kill enough of one another to leave Dunmore and the Crown in even greater control. Archibald Campbell ended up caught between the two groups and definitely wanted to avoid any more conflict and said so. So he packed and went to Bermuda. The article did not indicate if he or any children returned to Norfolk. (Materials regarding Archibald, Donald and James Campbell of Norfolk from Economic Development and Political Authority: Norfolk, Virginia Merchant-Magistrates 1736-1800, by Thomas Costa, 1991, PhD thesis College of William and Mary.) Note, in this book Costa summarizes the condition of Norfolk borough (city) in the 1760’s and for some time later as almost completely lawless with the borough government having no civil control and at odds with the county. A number of the persons victimized by the 1768 riots left this city and county and moved southward and otherwise elsewhere. Norfolk developed a reputation for being anti-Scots and anti-business.
Going back to the records found by David Dobson about Scots in the Chesapeake area: James Campbell, merchant settled in Virginia, before 1769. (SRO.CC9 vol 64.21.4.1769). This is most likely the James Campbell who was in Norfolk, described in records as a merchant who arrived after Hugh and Archibald. He actually arrived before 1768 but it appears sometime in the 1760’s, not earlier.
James Campbell, clergyman shipped to Virginia in 1721. (EMA18)
James Campbell, born in 1712, in Scotland, was a resident of King George County in 1738 and reported (and advertised) as a runaway in the “Virginia Gazette,” 26th January, 1738.
James Campbell born in 1738 in Scotland, resided in Stafford County Virginia and was in the militia in 1757 (French and Indian War). (VMHB.1 / 2) (L) .
Joel Campbell, born 1739, son of Joel Campbell of Glasgow settled in Amherst County, Virginia, married Nancy E. Mills and died in 1832 (CCS/USA)
John Campbell, merchant, shipped in 1760, initially was at Alexandria and eventually settled at Bladensburg, Virginia by 1790 (SRO.CS238,misc26/1) Letterbook 1760-64 Alexandria VA Library of Virginia.
Peter Campbell, coppersmith, Glasgow, Scotland shipped 1714 on the “American Merchant” to the Potomac River (area) of Virginia (TM202)
Peter Campbell, b. 1755, merchant in Glasgow, shipped before 1775 from Glasgow to Virginia, settled in Prince George County, VA (SRA.CFI)
Thomas Campbell, b. 1 February, 1763, son of Rev. Alexander Campbell, clergyman and teacher. Educated at Glasgow University, died at Bethany, Virginia (now West Virginia) 4 November, 1854 (WA 162)
Walter Campbell, born ___ in Scotland, as per will, probate (will/estate administration). 24 September, 1751 BrunswickCounty, Virginia, married Tabitha ___ (Brunswick Wills 3.33) He is in deeds in Brunswick County, earliest record is 1740/1, and in 1745, along with Robert Campbell, witnessed a deed between William Smith of Surry County and Cornelius Cargill of Brunswick County, and another the same year between Edward Givings of Brunswick County, planter and Abraham Cocke, gentleman of Amelia County. Four more deeds in 1746 had the same two witnesses, suggesting a relationship between the two men. Robert first appears in records shortly after Walter, suggesting Walter may have arrived with a son, Robert, not quite of age, who became of age within five years of the family being in Brunswick County. A Charles Campbell first appears on records in 1746 but is NOT with Walter and Robert. Robert disappears from records in the second half of 1746 but then appears as a witness to a deed in 1747 in Lunenburg County, where many former residents of Brunswick County later appear. On May 1, 1746, Lunenburg County was created from part of Brunswick County so it seems likely that Robert didn’t move; the county line did. However, both Walter and Robert witnessed yet another deed in Brunswick County in 1748. In December, 1750, Walter and Tabitha Campbell both witnessed a deed together, in 1754, Robert Campbell, alone witnessed a deed in Brunswick County. Charles Campbell disappeared from the county after 1748. Walter Campbell, Revolutionary War veteran stated in his pension application of 1833, that he was 83 years old and born in Brunswick County, Virginia in August, 1752, and there was a Bible record kept by his parents but he did not have his own copy of a birth record, and he had moved to Granville County, North Carolina by the start of the Revolution. After the Revolution he moved to Wake County, North Carolina and then in 1818 he moved to Montgomery County, Alabama.
As the first Walter Campbell in Brunswick died in 1751, the younger Walter Campbell born in Brunswick County in 1752 has to be a grandson of that first Walter (the forename is quite rare) and since he was born in 1752 when Robert seems to have been the only Campbell left in the county, the second Walter was almost certainly the son of Robert and Robert was a son of the first Walter Campbell. In 1833, the younger Walter Campbell was living in Montgomery County, Alabama and his deposition for his application was taken there. (Application: R 1649).. From marriage records is an interesting marriage: May, 1752 John Bates married Tabitha Campbell, widow of Walter. Will of Walter Campbell mentions wife, Tabitha, to have 150 acres of land and cattle and the many slaves her father gave to them, and rest of land in Lunenburg and Brunswick Counties to be subject to debts. Upon Tabitha’s death the land was to go to Walter’ sister, Sarah Campbell or Hogg in Scotland. This confirms that Walter Campbell was born in Scotland and married (2nd wife?) somewhere in Virginia.
There was a Walter Campbell in Amelia County in 1740 who witnessed several deeds, always with John and/or Richard Jones. As Amelia County in the 1740’s neighbored Brunswick County, this is highly probably the same Walter and his wife’s maiden name may have been Tabitha Jones–and she may have been his second wife, and son Robert a son of a first wife who died in either Scotland or Amelia County, Virginia. His will did not list children but he may have given his son part of his property before he died as Robert is too often with him as a witness not to be related and then Robert named a son Walter who was born in the same county both Robert and Walter “Sr.” resided.
William Campbell, merchant settled in Accomack County. Will probated 5 February, 1716 in Accomack County, Virginia
William Campbell, son of ___Campbell and Elizabeth Adair, merchant resident of Glasgow, Scotland died in Virginia in 1718. Will probated Sept 1718 (PCC). This suggests he may not have left any family in Virginia. Will would need to be seen to verify any Virginia family.
William Campbell, storekeeper, settled in Westmoreland County, Virginia prior to 1731 (SRO.GO.1.455)
From a Directory of Scots Banished to the Plantations: 1650-1775, also by David Dobson, very few of those transported as rebels or criminals were discernibly taken to Virginia and stated to have arrived in Virginia One for certain, was a John Campbell, who had been imprisoned in the Edinburgh Tolbooth (for what is not said), and was transported from Leith aboard “The Phoenix of Leith” to Virginia in April, 1666. Where he settled is also not stated.
In 1650 and 1651, a number of persons who had supported Charles i and his son were transported and sold as slaves in Boston, Massachusetts. Most were released within a few years by masters, and others released when Parliament restored Charles II to the English (as well as Scottish) throne. A few were taken to Maryland. In 1685, a number of Covenanters were taken to “East Jersey,” as indentured servants for their crimes and after service most left this region for other colonies, including Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia. More Scots settled in Maryland in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s than in Virginia. After the rebellions of 1716 and 1745, those Scots not executed were almost all taken to the Caribbean islands, and sentenced to an average of seven years as indentured servants. After service, most who lived, stayed in the Caribbean.
Cecilia L. Fábos-Becker, is oldest daughter of the late Wilma Maie Wallace-Fabos (1922-1987)and the late Stephen John George Fabos (1924-2005),; and Wilma descended from the two major Wallace lines (Craigie and Failford, who have early (pre-immigration to what became the U.S.) Campbell marriages with the Campbells of Loudon), and Loudon again through the cadet houses of Cessnock and Skeldon when Elizabeth Campbell of the Irish branch of the Skeldon Campbells married Samuel Woods of the twp intermarried Woods’ families of Antrim-Down-Armagh-Louth and a Monaghan-Cavan line with a southern branch in Kildare and Meath, in/near Dunshaughlin. and their daughter Martha Woods married Peter Wallace (a first cousin marriage). A Ross line of Wilma’s is also descended from an early Campbell Thane of Cawdor. This ancestry of Wilma is mostly through her late father William Thomas Wallace (1880-1945; Wallace, Woods, Ross, and Campbell). “Fabos” is Hungarian and not the original paternal surname but a very old title for a aristocratic Hungarian family, well known in Hungarian history who used the title as a surname when proscribed against or sent into exile, as her paternal grandfather was in 1906. Husband is primarily of Austrian, Swiss-Austrian, Irish, Scottish and Norman-Welsh-English descent. Cecilia has degrees in history and anthropology from the University of Minnesota, and did a master’s program in history while an undergraduate (not recommended for anyone to do that again, at least not with as many classes per quarter), a professional researcher in a number of fields, and has been a family history researcher for over 50 years.--San Jose, California, 2022