While I’d like to consider myself a fairly competent, experienced amateur genealogist, and have unearthed a great deal of information about my family history, I have to admit that it’s impossible to write a complete family history. The further back I go in time, the more ancestors I had: two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, and so on. The further back I dig, the bigger my family gets. Statistically, it seems, there’s a point somewhere in the past where most people alive in Europe at the time were my ancestors. If that’s the case, then writing about my family history seems like a pretty massive project. It would be a story of millions of individual lives and the ways they interacted with each other and the world around them.

Still, it’s interesting to see how much we can discover. It may be near impossible to put together a truly comprehensive family history, but there are things we can know about our ancestors. I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned, beginning with the history of the people whose history could perhaps most accurately be described as my family history. They were the people from whom I inherited not only some of my genes, but also my family name: the MacVays.

There are several variants of the name MacVay and several possible origins as well. Most likely my family came from Ireland, where my ancestors were hereditary physicians named MacBheatha, an old Gaelic name which means ‘Son of Life’ (and is pronounced pretty much like MacVay). Around the year 1300, the king they were serving in northeast Ireland sent them to Scotland with his daughter as part of the dowry paid to her new husband, one of the Lords of the Isles. The MacBheatha family were inheritors of what was at the time advanced medical knowledge: the knowledge of the great Arab and Persian scholars Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and Jabir, knowledge which reached Scotland and Ireland via the monasteries of France and Italy and the centres of learning of Muslim Spain. (There’s even a theory that the MacBheatha family’s knowledge of those scholars’ work led to the invention of whisky, which was called uisge-beatha — water of life). The MacBheathas prospered under the Lords of the Isles (who were later known as the MacDonalds) and later served several other prominent families, such as Clan MacLean. After a few hundred years in Scotland, the descendants of the original MacBheatha physicians bore many different variations of the MacBheatha name, including Beaton and several variants of the name MacVay. By the 1700s, my MacVay ancestors were probably either soldiers or farmers.

At some point, perhaps during the 1700s but most likely during the 1600s, my MacVay ancestors, whose own ancestors had gone to Scotland as Irishmen, returned to Ireland as Scots. They became what are now known as Ulster Scots, Scottish settlers in what is now Northern Ireland. My MacVays ended up somewhere in County Antrim. I first knew of this around the time that I first got hooked on genealogy, when I found my great-grandfather’s obituary in a micro-film archive of my hometown’s library. As my quest deepened over the years, I found more and more references to Antrim.

Unfortunately, almost 20 years after I first discovered my family’s Irish connection, I still don’t know which part of Antrim my family lived in. I blame this gap in my records on an event seemingly unrelated to my family history, the shelling of the Four Courts building in Dublin in 1922, which resulted in the destruction of most of Ireland’s census returns and other records important to genealogists. Anyone whose ancestors came from Ireland faces a real uphill battle, if not a brick wall. Not one to let a brick wall stand in my way, I’ve done as much detective work as I could, using available census substitutes and what I already know about my family. Somehow I’ve been able to put together a hypothesis that my MacVay ancestors lived in the north of Antrim, specifically in and around the parishes of Billy and Derrykeighan. I might even go as far as to say they may have lived in or near the village of Lisnagunnogue, not far from the Giant’s Causeway. My other theory, just as shaky, is that they lived in Antrim town, or in its parish, also called Antrim. Ah, I don’t know.

Whatever the case may be, I do know that my great-great-grandfather, Alexander MacVay, was born in Antrim around the year 1812. Around 1835 he married another Ulster Scot, Elizabeth Armour, and they began having children. They had nine children in Ireland but four of them — all boys — died very young. The terrible tragedy of losing a child (let alone four) was something many others in Ireland would experience in those years because of the terrible famine that swept through the country. Among the many, many people who eventually left Ireland were the surviving members of my family: Alexander, Elizabeth, their sons William and Joseph, and their daughters Jane, Mary and Elizabeth, around the year 1854. Their destination was a place that was foreign to them but also a place they considered to be their true home: Scotland.

The MacVays spent a couple of years in Houston, a village near Johnstone just outside Glasgow (basically around where the airport is now), where Elizabeth gave birth to her tenth child, Isabella. Some members of the family may have been working at the Crosslee cotton mill. The mill closed in 1858 after a fire. At some point between 1855 and 1861 the MacVays moved into the south gate house of a mansion called Milliken House in nearby Kilbarchan. Alexander worked as a shoemaker; Elizabeth may have worked as a servant in Milliken House. Then, in the early 1860s, after just a few years in Scotland, the entire family (with the exception of eldest daughter Jane, who married Hugh Cairns and stayed in Renfrewshire) moved to Canada.

The MacVays arrived in St. Stephen, New Brunswick around 1862 and lived on Water Street near Milltown Road. Alexander worked as a shoemaker for a few years; his teenage sons William and Joseph worked as lumbermen. By 1870 the MacVays had saved up enough money to buy a plot of land; they settled on farmland in a place called Little Ridge in the neighbouring parish of St. James. Alexander MacVay was now a farmer, with a very different life from the one he had been born into.

William and Joseph MacVay, though a couple of years apart in age, looked very much alike and often passed for twins. They worked together in the lumber trade; Joseph eventually started his own construction company. While Joseph specialized in wood, William became a skilled mason. The two brothers continued to work together; some of the buildings they made still stand, notably the train station in McAdam, NB.

Joseph MacVay and his family sometime in the late 1800s

The five children who had journeyed to Canada with Alex and Eliza MacVay all married in New Brunswick. Joseph MacVay married Mary Elizabeth Hall, one of 13 children of Ebeneezer Hall; Elizabeth MacVay married Moses Tufts Pomeroy; Mary MacVay married James Hamilton Pomeroy; Isabella married Thomas Andrew Shirley. William, the eldest of the five children, was the last to marry. On 16 Sept. 1879, at the age of 35, William was married to 16-year-old Frances Amelia MacArtney. Fanny, as she was called, was from Grand Lake Stream, Maine, just across the St. Croix river from Little Ridge. Her parents were George Edward MacArtney and Mary Ann McBrine, both from Ireland (I believe they were from Fermanagh). The MacArtneys had a couple of businesses; Fanny’s brother Robert started a successful clothing store in Massachusetts that I believe is still in operation today.

Except for Elizabeth Pomeroy, who died childless at 36, the children of Alex and Eliza MacVay all went on to have children of their own, who in turn had children, and so on; now Alexander and Elizabeth MacVay have descendants with many different family names in New Brunswick and elsewhere. Of perhaps several hundred of that pioneering couple’s descendants, only a handful are actually MacVays: besides a grandson of Joseph MacVay (a nice man named William MacVay who lives in Florida), there’s my father, my brother, my sisters, my nephew, my son and me. Except for William MacVay in Florida, all of the MacVays in our family today are descended from Alexander’s other son, William MacVay, my great-grandfather.

Alexander MacVay fell down some stairs in his home at the beginning of 1892 and never fully recovered. He died at Little Ridge on 3 Feb 1896 at the age of 84. Eliza went to live with her daughter Isabella and son-in-law Tom Shirley in Milltown, where she passed away in 1902 at the age of 90.

The grave of Alexander and Elizabeth MacVay

I visited that part of New Brunswick a few years back and was able to see my great-great-grandparents’ grave. I even got to meet relatives, most notably a lovely man by the name of Joe Flewelling, a grandson of Joseph MacVay. Joe shared my interest in our family’s history and passed a lot of information on to me. He remembered meeting my great-grandfather William several times when he was a boy and told me about conversations they’d had. To me that was amazing: hearing someone give a first-hand account of words spoken by a guy who was born in 1844 and died a long time ago. I know, for example, that William smoked one cigarette in his entire life. It was also Joe who gave me valuable leads on the family’s years in Scotland. It’s a shame Joe passed away several years ago, because every time I find new information on our family I think Joe would love this. And there is always something else to discover. The quest is never over; nor is this story.

Next time: Part two.