Glengarry County, Ontario Genealogy

Glengarry is located on the southeastern boundary of the province of Ontario. It stretches for twenty miles along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. Its original two (now four) townships reach twenty-two miles inland, taking in fertile lowlands, gentle hills, and the stone-covered fields seemingly beloved by Highland farmers everywhere.

Highland inheritance has marked the inhabitants of Glengarry from the first years of settlement. County historians Royce MacGillivray and Ewan Ross argue forcefully that Glengarry was a nation "with its own intense sense of cohesion and of separation from the outside world, its own customs and values, its own awareness of having its own heroic past separate from that of the country of which it has been a part, and for a time, even its own language."

The county was originally made up of Scottish emigrants from the Highlands of Scotland. These emigrants created the new Highland community. Between 1773 and 1853, close to 3,500 people emigrated to Glengarry County from a few districts in the Scottish Highlands. The emigrants came from the districts in Scotland of Lochiel, Glengarry, Knoydart and Glenelg. This was a mountainous area of mainland Inverness-shire. Many of these clansmen had been supporters of the Jacobite cause in 1745. They had suffered from military suppression and modernization of agricultural organization. The ordinary clansmen could not amass the capital needed to finance these activities.

The Highlanders emigrated from Scotland to North America. The Glengarry settlement originated in a desire to take advantage of the new opportunities available in Canada. Most emigrated from 1785 to 1802.

The first clansmen to reach Glengarry County came from the new United States during and just after the Revolutionary War; they had actually left Scotland for the colony of New York, mostly in 1773. The largest group of these families was led by three Macdonell brothers, Aberchalder, Collachie, and Leek, originally tacksmen from the Glengarry estate. The American Revolution transformed the emigrants into Loyalist refugees whose Canadian refuge became the necleus of the new Highland community. No sooner had the Loyalists obtained land in Glengarry Couny in 1784 than they were joined by friends and relatives, who organized five sailings from Scotland within nine years. Military officers such as Alexander McMillan and Miles Macdonell, tacksmen such as Alexander Macdonell of Greenfield and Kenneth McLeod of Glenelg, religios leaders such as Father Alexander McDonell of Scotus, and substantial tenants such as Angus Ban Macdonell of Muniall, led the departures. After a lull, created by the war of 1794, two groups of close to a thousand clansmen emigrated to Glengarry in the brief peace of 1802. In 1815 the last large group of emigrants left western Inverness for Glengarry County. Other smaller groups of Highlanders reached Canada from the same districts or neighboring ones, almost rebuilding the whole of western Inverness communities in Glengarry County.