Where In the World Is Clachan? (2011)

“Doug,” my wife called out, “Keith is on the phone.” I ran upstairs to take the call. It was 2011, and my brother, Keith, was calling from Halifax. We'd been talking of going to Scotland to tour our ancestors’ homelands.

“Are you coming or not?” he asked.

“Let’s do it next year,” I suggested.

“That’s what you said last year.”

My younger brother recognized a pattern, so he stated his query more firmly: “I am not asking when you want to go. I am going this year, and am asking if you want to come.”

No more excuses. I committed. “OK. Count me in.”

Our plan was to follow Frank Darroch’s footsteps to Clachan. If it weren’t for him, we would not have known where to begin. Fifty years earlier, Frank himself was unaware of Clachan’s location. He wrote, “We had known that my grandfather, John Darroch, was born in Clachan but were uncertain where this was….”

To find Clachan, Frank wrote to the Scottish Ancestry Research Society. They provided information from an 1851 census that “Archibald Darroch with his wife and some of his children lived on Dunskeig Farm, Clachan, Argyllshire.” Frank now had a physical location and was able to plan his trip.

Frank’s documentation helped us plan our trip as well. We toured the haunts of our ancestors and saw the sites Frank referred to in his book. We also toured the Isle of Islay, where our Robertson ancestors lived. This map shows the proximity of the ancestral homes of our great-grandparents on both sides of our family.

This map is from Frank’s red book (p. 8). We adapted it to show the Robertson and Darroch families’ homes. A map of this scale would typically not include Clachan (between the red letters B and C), for it is only a small village. This detail, so carefully included, implies Frank may have personally drawn the map.

Our trip was glorious—better than I could have imagined! Since then, I have talked to numerous Darroch descendants who have travelled back to Clachan. Each was grateful to Frank for marking the path.

Have you been to Clachan or Islay? Whether or not you have, I invite you to come on a virtual trip. We will visit the places and learn about the milieu in which our ancestors lived in the 1800s.

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References:

The two quotes are taken from Frank Darroch's red book, A Darroch Family in Scotland and in Canada, (1974), page 20. (Also see http://www.darroch.org/darroch_search.html.)

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