M A C V A Y S I A

I’m not a big fan of the Royal Malaysian Police. As far as I know, none of the police reports I’ve made since coming to Malaysia have resulted in anything resembling a thorough investigation; no one I’ve ever made a report against has ever been held accountable for whatever it was they had done. I’ve even had run-ins with the police myself: one off-duty officer nearly killed me when he acted as if a one-lane road had two lanes, then pulled me over when I gave him the finger; one time an officer who was directing traffic watched a motorcycle cut in front of me and run into me, then told the motorcyclist to continue on his way and told me he didn’t care about me or my car. Then there’s all the bribery. I don’t think I need to point out that Malaysian police officers will often take (and ask for) bribes. We’ve all seen it.

Yet I was glad to see news recently that officers of the Royal Malaysian Police will be getting a raise. Yes, believe it or not, I think they deserve more money. I think if Malaysian cops made more money, they might (and hopefully would) become more professional. Or, to put it another way: a pay raise would be one of just many steps the government could take towards making the Royal Malaysian Police a better police force.

The response to that statement is almost always the same: Even if they’re paid more, people told me, Malaysian cops will be corrupt. Do I really believe cops here would stop asking for bribes if they were paid more? No, I don’t. I understand it will take some time to eradicated corruption in the Royal Malaysian Police, because it’s deeply ingrained in the culture here and isn’t just caused by low pay. But I really do believe paying Malaysian cops more money will help. They’re currently getting what to me seems like the equivalent of what I made when I was working as a security guard on the Halifax waterfront. Except for one overzealous guard, who had a tricked-out utility belt and a badge and desperately wanted to be a cop but kept getting rejected, pretty much everyone who worked for that company did the barest minimum of work that was required of them. Why? Because they were all getting paid minimum wage. The boss paid them the least he was required to pay, so they all gave the least amount of effort (when I say they I mean we, of course). Even the wannabe cop finally cracked and was arrested for breaking into a shop on his watch and stealing clothes.

When I was working as a security guard back in those lean times, I didn’t think I was getting paid nearly enough to deal with drunks, shoplifters, panhandlers, and the occasional rowdy pub-goer. There was even an armed robbery once on the property I was guarding, but I wasn’t about to chase a guy with a gun. Not for the crap money I was making. That’s a job for real cops. They have weapons, they have training, and they have a sense of pride in what they do. Malaysian cops, it seems to me, have only two of those three things (and only barely so, I might add). They face the same dangers as cops back home — even worse dangers, I think, considering how much violent crime we have here — but they don’t even come close to displaying the same professionalism. It’s not a stretch to think their low salaries might have something to do with that. No, they wouldn’t all suddenly become better cops if they were paid more. But I really do think higher salaries would lead to a rise in professionalism, or would at least be part of any sincere effort to improve policing here.

My father with a new police car in 1978.

My father is a retired police officer. He served for over 20 years with the Sydney Police Department (now known as the Cape Breton Regional Police Services), first as a beat cop and then as a member of the ‘Ident’ section (basically, Dad was a CSI). My best buddy from high school is currently a member of the force. I thought about becoming a police officer myself, long ago, as did my brother. It’s a job people want to do, and one they’re proud to do. Cops back home make decent money. It’s not that they do their job well just because they’re paid good money. They’re paid good money because of the work they do, and because of what’s expected of them. There are lots of good police forces in Canada, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which to me seems as different from its Malaysian counterpart as day is from night.

The MacVay boys, Officers Mopey & Dopey.

Malaysia has a lot of cops who don’t do their jobs very well, but there must be cops here who do. Reward them. Make police work something Malaysians want to do, and something they can be proud of. Higher salaries constitute just one step, of course, in a series of steps required to make the police force better. It’s a start, though.

And while we’re at it, how about teachers? And nurses? I know, maybe what I’m suggesting isn’t 100% realistic. I mean, we’re not just talking about different police forces but different countries, different economies, different-sized middle classes, different styles of government (I’m having a good day so I won’t elaborate on that last one). But still, it would be nice.

The death of her husband at noon on the 2nd of June 1937 was a harsh blow to my great-grandmother, Susan MacLeod. But if she thought that day couldn’t possibly get any worse, she was wrong. After the funeral, Father MacGillivray showed up at the door of her small apartment on Intercolonial Street with two nuns and several large paper bags.

“We’ve come for the children,” he said. “They belong to the Church.”

The death of John Rory MacLeod meant Susan was left to care for not only the several children they’d had together, but also John R’s two children from his first marriage (though the elder of the two, Donald, was in his teens and just about ready to fend for himself) and Big Jim, the mentally-challenged brother of John R’s late first wife. To top it off, Susan was heavily pregnant. Suddenly she was left to care for a double-digit family all by herself.

They belong to the Church. The words reverberated in Susan’s head like heavy rocks thrown down a dry stone well. As she stood there trying to come to terms with what was happening, the two nuns went around the apartment stuffing whatever items of children’s clothing they could find into the paper bags. Big grocery bags, with handles. They belong to the Church.

Susan, daughter of a fishing boat captain from Fogo Island, Newfoundland, was Anglican like her father, and had never become Catholic. The Church had permitted John R to marry her, but she’d had to sign papers guaranteeing their children would be raised Catholic. Now that John R was gone, the Church wasn’t going to leave anything to chance.

They belong to the Church. The echo in Susan’s head finally faded from a deafening roar to a faint whisper. Not one to yell or make a scene, she quietly walked to the door of the apartment, opened it, turned to father MacGillivray and said, “Get out. Now.”

Father MacGillivray was about to put up a fight. How could she possibly ensure the children would be brought up as good Catholics? Would she actually take them to church? How did she expect to care for such a large family by herself anyway? How could she? How could she? Those children belonged to the Church!

“These are my children,” she said, her eyes fixed on his. “Now get out.”

Maybe it was the look in her eye. Maybe it was her stance. Maybe Father MacGillivray knew the motto of Clan MacLeod was ‘Hold Fast’. Whatever it was, he could tell she was serious. He walked past her and out through the door, followed closely behind by the two nuns, who still hadn’t spoken a word. Their brown paper bags, the big ones with the handles, were empty again. Before Susan could close the door, Father MacGillivray turned to face her.

“We’ll be back,” he said. He pointed at her round belly. “And we’ll be coming for that one too.”

He made good on that promise. Father MacGillivray and the two nuns came back on more than one occasion. Each time, Susan would send the children running off in every direction. Father MacGillivray never got any of them. Susan MacLeod held fast.

When Susan MacLeod gave birth to her youngest child, Jackie, mere weeks after her husband’s death, she knew she was in real trouble. She had managed to prevent the Church from taking her children away, but knew she couldn’t keep that up for long. Her relatives could help out, but they could only do so much. She needed help.

Susan’s brother-in-law, Donald Ignecious MacLeod, known to all as Dan, stepped in to help. He and his wife Maggie (the former Margaret Sarah MacDonnell) agreed to take Susan’s two eldest boys, Duncan and Hughie, for the summer.

Susan MacLeod struggled and suffered great hardship, with the family never far from excruciating poverty, and sometimes neck-deep in it. My granduncle Hugh MacLeod once said they were so poor that “on Christmas morning if you woke up without a hard-on you’d have nothing to play with.” But Susan raised her children. She held fast.

My great-grandmother, Susan MacLeod

Ironically, years later, she became Catholic. She never wavered from her determination to protect her children, though, right till the end. For Susan MacLeod, the end came on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1968. She was crossing Prince Street when she was hit by a drunk driver. The force of the impact killed her instantly and threw her from one corner to another. The driver of the car, a prominent local politician, was never punished.

The end of her life was tragic, just like that of her husband. But while she was alive she was not only a great mother to her children, but a shining example of quiet determination, of tenacity in the face of adversity. I’m glad Susan MacLeod held fast. And I’m glad she sent her two eldest sons, Duncan and Hughie, up to River Denys Mountain that summer after John R died. That was the start of an annual tradition of sorts, one which provided my grandfather — and me — with lots of great stories. In fact, the story of my grandfather’s first trip to that side of the island is one of my favourites.

But that’s a story for another day.

Chronicles of Duncan MacLeod is a series of posts on my MacLeod ancestors. Some are based on information I dug up myself but most are stories told to me by my grandfather, Duncan MacLeod. Here are the other posts in the series:

The Swans of Eigg
The Gardener’s Crossing
The Kilt
Crooked-Neck MacLean
One Eye, Two Guns, Three Tunes & Twenty-five Cents

My great-grandfather, John Rory MacLeod, was born in July 1889 in the area of Cape Breton island which contains the small communities of Glencoe and Upper Southwest Mabou. (There are several distinct places up there associated with my family, such as Glencoe Mills, MacLeod Settlement and Upper Southwest Mabou, but my grandfather always refers to them collectively as Glencoe.) The island had seen several waves of immigrants over the years, mostly Scots. But in the early 20th century, long after the last ships full of Highland settlers had arrived on its shores, Cape Breton began to see more and more outmigration, as men from the island went off in search of work elsewhere.

Some only went as far as the island’s industrial western edge, to work at the newly-built steel mill or in the coal mines. Some went down to what they called “the Boston states”. Others went to work as lumbermen in New Brunswick. Many went further west to Ontario, a province whose mines and factories would claim the lives of two of John R’s brothers in 1928: John ‘Mor’ (Big John, who died in Windsor) and Duncan (who died in Cochrane, about an hour’s drive from Timmins). John R worked in many of those places; from New Brunswick’s forests, he ventured up into the Yukon, where he worked in mines and searched for gold. The great Klondike gold rush had long since ended, but there was still gold to be found and fortunes to be made, and the Yukon was still a very rough-and-tumble place. According to my grandfather, John R carried a revolver on each hip during his time up north.

Fortune eluded John R, however, and he returned to Cape Breton, where on 12 April 1915 he married Mary Gillis, daughter of farmers Archibald and Mary Ann Gillis of Grand Mira. John R and Mary began having children (a son named Donald and a daughter named Jessie) and John R did his best to make a living. He briefly worked as a fireman, but he was fired when his superiors learned he was blind in one eye. I’m not sure if he was born that way, or if he was injured during his time working away from the island. I suppose the reason didn’t matter at the time. John R was out of a job. Lucky for him, the Dominion Iron and Steel Company was always looking for labourers.

Life had more tests for John R, though. Only a few years into his marriage, his wife Mary died of cancer, leaving him to care for his son, his daughter, and his mentally-challenged brother-in-law, Big Jim. John R soon married again, this time to Susan Powell, from the small island of Fogo, Newfoundland, daughter of Eliza Leyte and a fishing boat captain named Nathaniel Powell. John R and Susan welcomed their first child together on 22 November 1927 in the house they lived in on Townsend Street. It was a boy; they named him Duncan.

John Rory MacLeod

Duncan MacLeod, my grandfather, has happy memories of his father. He told me he had to read the Saturday morning paper to his father because John R was illiterate. Duncan — Papa — would even read the little speech balloons as he and his father looked at the comics. Papa told me his father had a fiddle and claimed to know three tunes, though he only ever played one, Red Wing (here’s a video of someone playing that tune).

Something else Papa remembers about John R is that he and Susan never fought, never argued at all. Papa only ever saw his mother, a very quiet person, get angry at his father once. It was just after a blizzard, and John R left the house to make the long, difficult walk to the steel plant to shovel snow. He’d been gone a long time but suddenly reappeared at the door. When Susan asked him what he was doing home, he said he’d got halfway to work when a drunk asked him for money; he didn’t have any so he’d come home to get a quarter. That was the only time Duncan MacLeod ever saw his mother get angry at his father.

John R and Susan had several more children and, though every extra mouth to feed meant life would be more difficult, they were happy. But at the beginning of June, 1937, all that came to an end. John R was walking home from work on June 1st when a truck carrying a full load of hot slag (the stuff left over when coal is burnt) lost control and crashed, dumping its contents right on top of him. He suffered horrific burns from the waist down and was rushed to the hospital. His boss sent someone to his home (at the time the MacLeods were living in a 2nd-floor apartment on Intercolonial Street) to tell Susan that John R had had a “little accident”. Susan was told there was no need to go to the hospital. The next morning, however, Father MacGillivray came to see Susan and told her she needed to go to the hospital right away.

When Susan got to the hospital she was told she could talk to her husband but couldn’t look behind the curtain that was draped between them. So she sat and talked with John R, who asked her if the children were okay. “Make sure the boys are in by seven,” he said to her. Then he died, just as the church bells were ringing at noon. John Rory MacLeod was just shy of his 48th birthday.

Life was hard while John R was alive; now that he was gone, Susan and her children were about to find out just how hard it could be. But that’s a story for another day.

Chronicles of Duncan MacLeod is a series of posts on my MacLeod ancestors. Some are based on information I dug up myself but most are stories told to me by my grandfather, Duncan MacLeod. Here are the other posts in the series:

Chronicles of Duncan MacLeod: The Swans of Eigg
Chronicles of Duncan MacLeod: The Gardener’s Crossing
Chronicles of Duncan MacLeod: The Kilt
Chronicles of Duncan MacLeod: Crooked-Neck MacLean

With all the family history stuff I write here in my blog, one might begin to wonder why I don’t write about my wife’s family history. Well unfortunately genealogy is a very difficult endeavour here in Malaysia. A lack of accessible records (and in many cases a lack of records, period) means you’re forced to rely almost completely on oral histories. That’s not a horrible thing, as the old folks here can tell you quite a bit. However, reliance on oral histories definitely has its drawbacks, the major ones being 1) you won’t get very far back into the history of any given family, 2) you won’t get a lot of specific information such as dates, and 3) you will get a lot of stories that include all sorts of fantastical elements.

That pretty much describes my wife’s family history. I haven’t been able to go very far back, especially on her mother’s side of the family. Even when I have been able to find information on ancestors, it was usually just their names, with the rest of those people’s lives remaining shrouded in the fog of time. Also, while there are family members who claim to know a lot about the family history, it’s difficult to know how much of it is true. Leen’s paternal ancestry is rife with tales of jinn and psychic powers; her maternal ancestry, if the uncle who’s supposed to know the most about it can be believed, includes a pirate treasure at the bottom of the sea.

Still, when it comes to Leen’s family history, I’ll take what I can get. After all, it’s all part of my children’s ancestry as well. And mine, in a way. I mean, these people are my family now. Their blood doesn’t run through my veins, but still…we’re family.

Anyway, the furthest I could trace back in Leen’s family was a man named Raden Ipok (no one is sure of the actual spelling), who lived in Pekalongan, in Central Java, Indonesia sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century. I know very little about him other than his name and the fact that he was not a Muslim. I’m not absolutely sure what religion he followed, though it seems he was either a Buddhist or an animist (his indigenous culture, whatever it was, may have included elements of animism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, or at least some of those things). His son, Raden Peroyo, supposedly had 17 wives but only ended up with three children. One of those children was named something like Raden Ritz. He was the one who brought the family into the fold of Islam. As the story goes, Raden Ritz fell in love with the daughter of a kyai (the head of an Islamic boarding school) and converted to Islam so he could marry her. Upon conversion he changed his name to Rais.

Accounts of this lineage by different family members begin to diverge somewhat here. One story has it that Rais had a son named Qudri or Qadri and that he, not Rais, was Leen’s great-great-grandfather. In yet another version of the family history, there isn’t even a Rais, and Leen’s great-great-grandfather is Peroyo. Whatever the case, after either Rais or Qudri (or maybe even after Peroyo) came Leen’s great-grandfather, Raden Falali (sometimes called Palali), who married a woman named Ummayah. They were fairly well off, with lots of land and horses and other material wealth. Leen’s eldest surviving uncle, Pak Andak, says that Raden Falali feared for the lives of his two sons because of the persecution of several noble families by the Dutch. He sent the boys to Malaysia on a steamship, but before they went he supposedly gave the elder of the two, 15-year old Raden Baron, a slip of paper upon which was written the name Salma, which wasn’t a woman’s name but that of a jinn (and a male one at that) that would protect Baron and his brother in Malaysia.

Baharom Bin Fadzil & Jamiah Binti Yusof

Raden Baron dropped the title Raden when he got to Malaysia and changed his name to Baharom Bin Fadzil (I’m not sure if Falali actually used the name Fadzil or not). Baharom settled in Muar, Johor and married a woman named Jamiah, a daughter of Javanese settlers named Yusof and Rubiah. Yusof was one of several brothers (three or four) who settled in Kampung Tengah in Muar. I’ve been told that about 90% of the people in Kampung Tengah are Leen’s relatives.

No one really knows what happened to Baharom’s brother, Selamat, also known as Pak Ngah Selamat. It seems shortly after getting married he was taken by the Japanese, who occupied Malaya from 1941 until the end of World War II. He was put on a train and sent north to help build a railway in a neighbouring country. One version of the story says he managed to jump off the train somewhere in Kedah and carried on with his life. According to another version of the story, he was taken to Burma but eventually released by the fearful Japanese, who had tried to boil him alive but couldn’t hurt him. Whatever the truth is, Selamat was never seen again.

Baharom had many different jobs over the years (including working the ferry that crossed the Muar River) and was supposedly aided in each by the jinn that accompanied him everywhere, the one whose name was written on the little slip of paper that Baharom always carried with him (usually in his hat). Stories abound of his miraculous accomplishments, such as completing a week’s worth of grass-cutting in one evening, or buying a banana and somehow arriving home with a whole bunch of them. His feats didn’t go unnoticed by others. One day he was riding his bicycle near his home when he was struck by a car belonging to Othman Saat, who was also from Kampung Tengah. Othman was shocked to see that while the bicycle was wrecked, Baharom didn’t have a scratch on him. Family lore has it that Othman coveted Baharom’s source of power. Baharom, fearful that the jinn’s power would corrupt him and anyone else it touched, buried the slip of paper with the jinn’s name on it somewhere on property that belonged to Othman. Othman dug it up and became the Chief Minister of Johor.

Baharom is the man holding the little girl; on the right is Jamiah. The little boy standing in front of Jamiah is my father-in-law, Abdul Rahman; next to him is his sister Aminah (Busu Noi). I’d like to find out who the other people in the picture are and if they’re also Leen’s relatives.

Baharom and Jamiah lived a quiet life in Muar and had 16 children, one of whom was Leen’s father, Abdul Rahman. Half of Baharom and Jamiah’s children, including my father-in-law and a set of triplets (Salam, Salim and Selamat), have passed away. The remaining children are Mak Uda, Pak Andak, Mak Alang, Mak Uteh, Mak Anjang, Bibik, Busu Noi, and Pak Jak (those aren’t their real names, just the names I know them by). It’s interesting to note that while none of them use the title Raden, Leen has one cousin (a daughter of the late Abdul Kadir, a.k.a. Pak Long) who does. I’m told some of Leen’s cousins also include the name al-Qudri in their names to denote descent from Raden Qadri/Qudri, who as I mentioned above may have been the son of Raden Rais.

Baharom, who would be called Tok Bak by Leen and his other grandchildren, continued to show signs of having mystical abilities throughout his life, despite having given up the slip of paper upon which was written the name of his jinn guardian. The slip of paper may have functioned as some sort of talisman, but apparently it wasn’t the true source of Baharom’s powers (as Othman Saat may have later discovered, when the rise of Mahathir and Musa Hitam led to his marginalization and eventual resignation, and a failed comeback attempt via the short-lived party Semangat 46). Baharom did his best to keep his abilities secret, but Leen remembers seeing some strange things. For example, she says one day she was in a room with Tok Bak, but then when she turned around and looked out the window, there he was, suddenly outside. His grandchildren loved him, but it seems most of them, including Leen, thought he was a little scary because of things like that. I’m not sure how much of it I can bring myself to believe, but I do wish I could have met him. Both of Leen’s paternal grandparents died several years ago.

Tok Bak in his later years.

I wish I knew as much about Leen’s maternal ancestry as I do about her father’s family history. Leen’s dad, Abdul Rahman Bin Hj. Baharom (Hj. is an abbreviation of Haji, which means Baharom had gone on the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca) married a nurse from Batu Pahat named Mariah Binti Hasnan, who is now my mother-in-law, my beloved Ibu. Whereas my late father-in-law was of Javanese descent, Ibu is of Bugis ancestry. Her father, Hasnan Bin Mohamed Ali, was a jack-of-all-trades who did various jobs in and around Kampung Minyak Beku. He married Khatijah Binti Osman and they had three girls, including my mother-in-law. However, Hasnan and Khatijah divorced not long after the birth of their third child, and Hasnan married a woman named Hamidah. She bore him several more children (I’m told that in all she had 16 children but I don’t know if some were from a previous marriage or not). Hasnan died fairly young, the first of Leen’s grandparents to pass away. Hamidah, whom Ibu calls Mak Uda, is still living in Kampung Minyak Beku; we usually visit her during Raya.

Abdul Rahman Bin Hj. Baharom & Mariah Binti Hasnan (a.k.a. Ayah & Ibu) on their wedding day.

Khatijah, Ibu’s mother, remained single for many years, but a tragic event would eventually lead her to marry again. When her older sister passed away, Khatijah became close to her newly-widowed brother-in-law. Each wanted someone who would take care of them, so they got married. Sadly, Khatijah developed breast cancer and, like her sister and her first husband, left the world too soon. Her second husband, heartbroken, followed soon after.

Abdul Rahman and Mariah, a.k.a. Ayah and Ibu, had their first child, Mazleen (yeah that’s my wife) in 1978 when Ibu was stationed at a government clinic in Salak Tinggi, Selangor. Leen was born in Seremban Hospital and spent her childhood in Minyak Beku and Muar. She later went to Sekolah Tun Fatimah, a boarding school in Johor Bahru. She then did two years of matriculation at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia before going off to Canada for five years, after which she came back with a degree in dentistry from Dalhousie University and (ahem) a husband from Cape Breton. Ayah and Ibu had three other children, all of whom have spent most of their lives in Muar. Leen’s brother Radzee (a.k.a. Ojee) is a JPJ (Road Transport Dept.) officer stationed in Muadzam, Pahang; Leen’ s sister Mazuin (a.k.a. Achik) works as a cook at the Sultanah Fatimah Specialist Hospital in Muar; Leen’s other brother, Ridzwan (a.k.a. Iwan) has been doing an IT diploma progamme at a college in Jitra, Kedah.

Leen with Ayah, Ibu, Iwan, Achik & Ojee.

Everyone’s been married off except Iwan. Ojee is married to a lovely young lady from Pagoh named Latifah, a.k.a. Tipah; Achik’s been married and divorced and has a son named Afiq, Alisdair’s only first cousin on this side of the world (he also has two in Canada). Achik’s getting married again this year, to a guy from Bengkalis, Indonesia.

It goes without saying that Leen has a lot of cousins. Her relatives are all over the country and work in a wide variety of professions, such as the doctor who delivered Alisdair in Shah Alam. It’s actually really hard to keep track of Leen’s extended family. There are some I’ve never met or hardly ever see. There are also some we’re quite close to, like Bibik’s family. I think of them as my family too, just like I consider Leen’s parents and siblings to be my family.

Celebrating Hari Raya in 2007 with my Malaysian family. Ayah passed away just a few weeks later.

My father-in-law passed away on November 6th 2007 in Muar, only two months after retiring from his job as an auditor for the local school district. Ayah’s passing was hard on Ibu but she’s been doing just fine. She retired not long ago and now spends a lot of time with her grandson Afiq. She gets to spend time with Alisdair quite often too. I don’t think Al will remember his Tok Ayah, but we’ll be sure to tell him as many stories as we can about his grandfather, and the other people from both sides of the world whose blood runs in his veins. We’ll tell him all about how his Tok Ayah was a pretty good drummer and had a great singing voice. We’ll tell him that his Tok Ayah would do anything for anyone, even if it meant he had to go without. We’ll tell Al all sort of stories about his Tok Ayah, and maybe a few about ancestors from further back.

As I said earlier, there are several different versions of the story of Baharom and his ancestors. It seems Tok Bak himself told more than one version of his family history. The result is that his children and grandchildren might not all agree on what the real story is. One of his grandchildren (the one I mentioned earlier who calls herself Raden) swears direct descent from the saints known as the Wali Songo, particularly Sunan Ampel. If that is indeed true, it can’t be through the direct paternal line (maybe through the kiai instead?), which may have been Buddhist until the mid-19th century or maybe even later. Of course, there’s no way of really knowing if that is even true. I don’t know anything about Javanese history, but I have to wonder if anyone in a family of Buddhists (or animists or any non-Muslims for that matter) would have even carried the title Raden.

Some information on the family written in the Jawi script, supposedly by Tok Bak himself. I can read Jawi newspapers with some effort but this handwriting really has me stumped. If anyone would like to have a go at it, I’d appreciate knowing what it says. There’s another sheet of paper on which he wrote a short genealogy in Rumi script, but I’m not sure if both pages have the same information.

Whether the story of Baharom is true or not, it certainly is interesting. And at least there actually is a story. It’s a shame that most of my kids’ maternal ancestry will be a big blank space compared to what I can tell them about my side of the family. But at least there is a story to tell. Maybe we’ll even uncover more someday, somehow. Who knows?

Most people who know me (and probably most people who read my blog) know that it really annoys me when someone spells my last name wrong. Actually, it annoys me a little less these days, just because I’m so used to it. But it’s still annoying. No matter how many times I tell people it’s M-a-c-V-a-y, I still see all sorts of different spellings. Probably the most common misspelling is the use of Mc instead of Mac. But while I’ve always found it somewhat irritating to see my name spelled M-c-V-a-y, lately I’ve been thinking it might be just as correct — or at least almost as correct — as the way I currently spell my name.

First things first: Both Mac and Mc mean exactly the same thing. Mac means son in both Scottish Gaelic and Irish. Contrary to popular belief, if does not mean son of. Instead, the word mac before a name places that name in the genitive case, which in Gaelic necessitates what’s called lenition or aspiration. In plain terms, that means the first letter of the name changes a bit. Names beginning with B, for example, will become Bh, which sounds like V. Hence beatha, meaning life, becomes bheatha (which is, interestingly enough, very similar to words for life in Latin languages), so that the family name becomes MacBheatha, which is pretty much pronounced the same as MacVay.

Mc is simply a contraction of Mac. There are all sorts of theories out there about the difference between Mac and Mc, the most common being that Mac is used by Protestant and Mc by Catholics (and also that Mac is Scottish, Mc is Irish; from these two misconceptions we get the origins of Irish Catholics being called Mickeys in America), but while that may be true in some cases (more on a possible example below), in most cases Mc is nothing more than a contraction of Mac. Here’s a better explanation than mine, an extract from a book called Tartan for Me! by Philip D. Smith, Jr. (which I found here):

Mac, Gaelic for “son”, is the most common element of Scottish and Irish surnames. In both countries, Mc is always an abbreviation of Mac. There is absolutely no truth to the American myth at Mac is Scottish and Mc is Irish. Mac used to be abbreviated M’ although this spelling is not common now. At times, all three versions can be seen. in an early book on Highland music, the author spelled his own family name three different ways on the first two pages — “MacDonald”, “McDonald”, and “M’Donald.”

Black’s The Surnames of Scotland and MacLysaght’s The Surnames of Ireland both treat Mac in the same way — as the only and original spelling. Persons seeking a name spelled “Mc” are expected to know that it is a conventional abbreviation for Mac. This same approach is used in Tartan For Me! To find “McDeal” look for “MacDeal.”

Mac is always considered an addition to a name. Before there was a “Donald’s Son” there was a “Donald”. In both Scotland and Nova Scotia, names beginning with Mac were traditionally alphabetized under the first letter of the second name — MacArthur under “A”, MacZeal under “Z”. Many Scots dropped “Mac” as they became Anglicized or emigrated, “Mac Wyeth” becoming simply “Wyeth”. “Kinzie” is from “MacKenzie”. The one notable exception is the Innes and MacInnes families, each quite distinct. The Innes family have Pictish roots and are from the east coast of Scotland with a red tartan. The MacInnes are of Gaelic origin from the west coast and wear a green tartan.

Mac takes a variety of pronunciations. In Islay Gaelic, Mac is pronounced like /mek/. In the United States one hears it as “mick”. Preceding a /k/ or /g/ sound, the final /k/ of Mac disappears. It became the practice in both the south of Scotland and in Ireland to write two words as one (MacGill to Magill; MacHale to Makale). In other names the /k/ sound of Mac is duplicated and attached to the front of a following word if it begins in a vowel (MacArter to MacCarter). The reverse also occurs. If the second name begins with a /k/ or /g/, producing two /k/ sounds together, one may disappear (MacGill to Magill; MacKenzie to MacEnzee). Mac is at times pronounced “muck” and written that way (Mac ‘il Roy to Muckleroy).

There’s also an interesting bit about the Anglicization of Gaelic names being helped along by the fact that a lot of Gaelic speakers could not read or write Gaelic (this one’s debatable) and would therefore just write names in English as they sounded in Gaelic.

Anyway, I’ve always taken it for granted that my family has used the MacVay spelling for a long time, beginning way back in Scotland, before my family moved to Ireland in the 17th century. Sure, the name was always recorded as McVay (or McVey, McVea, McVeigh, McVeagh, etc.) on old documents from Scotland, Ireland and Canada…but I know my MacVays have always spelled the name M-a-c-V-a-y, at least in Canada.

Or have they?

The grave of Alexander and Elizabeth MacVay

When I posted my family’s history a few months back, someone noticed the McVay spelling on my great-great-grandfather’s gravestone and asked in the comments if the family name had once been spelled that way. Here’s what I wrote in reply:

I’ve seen the name spelled McVay on documents, and of course on that gravestone. As far as I know, in my family it’s always been MacVay. Some members of the family got used to the McVay spelling and stuck with it, but most continued to use MacVay, even when they were still in NB. It would have been MacVay originally anyway, ‘Mc’ just being a contraction.

One interesting thing is the presence of the lines under the ‘c’ in ‘Mc’ on the gravestone. Alexander’s name was also spelled that way on the birth certificate of his daughter Isabella in Scotland in 1855. The clerk who copied down the name didn’t spell other ‘Mc’ names with the little lines. I know the lines were used to signify a raised ‘c’ (and therefore ‘Mc’ as a contraction of ‘Mac’); I suspect they were also used to show that a name spelled with the contraction ‘Mc’ was actually spelled ‘Mac’, whereas ‘Mc’ names without the little marks were always spelled ‘Mc’. That’s just a theory though. The short version of all this: I’m pretty sure we’ve always spelled it MacVay.

I now know that all of the descendants of my great-great-grandfather used the MacVay spelling, but in spite of that, I have to admit there’s another possibility besides what I wrote in that comment. That possibility is that my great-great-grandfather, Alexander MacVay, may have actually spelled his name Alexander McVay. The 1855 Scottish birth record of Isabella MacVay that I mentioned in that comment provides another clue: it appears to contain my great-great-grandfather’s signature, which reads Alex McVay. It looks like it may have actually been written by the clerk, because it looks suspiciously like the other signatures on the page. But if it is indeed my great-great-grandfather’s writing (the only example of it I have ever seen), then it appears the family name may have actually been McVay.

While the whole Scottish/Irish/Protestant/Catholic explanation of the difference between Mac and Mc may not be generally true, interestingly enough it may have been the reason behind the spelling change (if indeed there was one) in my family’s name. When my family arrived in St. Stephen, New Brunswick in the early 1860s, they found a number of McVays already living there, all Irish Catholics who had been in the area for many years. My family had lived in Ireland for several generations but didn’t consider themselves Irish. They were Ulster Scots who were fiercely proud of their Scottish roots; they were also staunch Presbyterians. Had my family settled in Cape Breton straight off the boat, I might just think they changed the spelling to fit in with their neighbours (who mostly used Mac). Instead, it seems like my family may have been trying to do the opposite.

Sure, it’s possible the spelling was MacVay all along. Like I said, maybe that signature wasn’t really written by my great-grandfather. And maybe the name was spelled wrong by whoever made that gravestone. All possible, but I’m not sure. After all, Alexander’s eldest son, my great-grandfather William MacVay, was an expert stonemason and may have made that gravestone himself, or at least had a hand in it.

Whatever the case, the name is MacVay now and my kids will be at least the fifth generation to spell it that way. But when I see our name as McVay (when, not if, because it’s pretty much inevitable), maybe I’ll be slightly less annoyed than before. Maybe. But only slightly.

As I mentioned in Part One, my great-grandparents, William and Fanny MacVay, had several children. The first, Robert Franklin MacVay, was born barely nine months after their marriage. Next came Alexander MacVay, Alice Maude MacVay, Elizabeth Armour MacVay, and finally William Kirk MacVay. All were born in New Brunswick except Kirk, who was born in the US, probably in Grand Lake Stream, Maine, where the MacArtneys had moved just before Fanny’s marriage to William.

It seems to have been fairly common in those times and those parts for people’s first and middle names to be interchangeable. Robert and Alexander were known by their first names (most people knew them as Robbie and Sandy, respectively), but the other three MacVay children were almost always called by their middle names: Maude, Armour and Kirk. However, I have to admit I don’t actually know which names were their middle names, because the names were used interchangeably to such an extent that I’ve seen both combinations of each name in pretty much equal numbers, even in official records. Like I said, though, it seems they went by the names Maude, Armour (the family name of William MacVay’s mother) and Kirk.

Life for the MacVay family in New Brunswick was good. But at the turn of the 20th century the family got an opportunity for an even better life: A steel mill known as the Dominion Iron and Steel Company had just been built in the town of Sydney, on Cape Breton Island in the neighbouring province of Nova Scotia. William’s masonry skills would be in constant demand at the new steel plant, whereas in New Brunswick Joseph’s lumber skills were more bankable. In 1901 the MacVays left Little Ridge and moved to Sydney.

For the first couple of years in Sydney the MacVays lived in a house on Falmouth Street not far from the waterfront. William worked as a bricklayer at the steel plant; Robbie and Sandy worked there as well. On 21 May 1903, William paid James and Suzannah Burchell a dollar for a 41-by-100-foot plot on the land known as Louisa Gardens in the city’s north end, took out a mortgage and built a house. It was a large house, perfect for a large family. William even added a personal touch: a fireplace that he crafted himself. The fireplace is still there; the house is now a ‘bed and breakfast’ and still looks beautiful.

The MacVay family home, 115 George St., Sydney NS

The fireplace William MacVay made for his home in Sydney

My family’s first few years in Nova Scotia were happy. The men of the family, William and his two eldest sons, had good jobs at the steel plant. Every morning they would dress in their finest suits, walk to work, change into their work clothes, spend the day in what was surely a filthy environment, then clean themselves up, put their nice suits back on, and walk home.

When he wasn’t working, William was practising masonry, but not the kind he did at work: he was a member of the Freemasons and eventually became quite prominent in the local lodge, where I’ve been told his picture still hangs.

William was proud of his Scottish heritage and did his best to hold onto what he perceived as his Scottish culture. An elderly relative who knew him told me once that he played the bagpipes and even occasionally “danced the swords“. Still, he was very reserved and preferred to express his fondness for his culture behind closed doors. Young Kirk, however, was less reserved; William often scolded him for doing the Highland Fling on street corners.

The MacVays circa 1904. Back row, left to right: Armour, William and Maude. Front row: Robert, Frances, Kirk and Alexander.

William’s reserved manner could probably be attributed to the fact that, like most Ulster Scots, he was a staunch Presbyterian. He often reminded his children that they were forbidden from marrying anyone who wasn’t also Presbyterian. Only a couple of his children stuck to the rules. Religion, however, would be the least of his worries in the years to come.

Robert, after spending his early years in rural New Brunswick, was now living in a nice house and had a good job. Not only that, he had something else to celebrate: he had met the love of his life, Bessie Randall Higgs, daughter of Thomas and Susan Higgs of Bayfield, Antigonish County. Robert and Bessie got married on 24 October 1906 by an Anglican minister. Soon they would have their first child and William and Fanny’s first grandchild. However, while giving birth to her son Ralph Higgs MacVay in Buffalo, New York, Bessie died. Robert was devastated and blamed Ralph for Bessie’s death. He refused to have anything to do with his son, forcing his parents, William and Fanny, to care for the child.

William was in his 60s at that time; Fanny was in her 40s. It had been a decade since the birth of their youngest child. People say that couples who spend a lot of time around babies can get pregnant more easily. I’m not so sure, but I do know of at least two examples of this happening: when Leen got pregnant we were helping our friend Azlin take care of her son Faaris in China; and not long after the birth of her first grandchild, Fanny MacVay got pregnant. When she was 45 years old she gave birth to her sixth child, Francis Reginald MacVay. Frank, as Francis was known, was almost the same age as his only nephew, so the two would be raised as brothers.

For Robert, things only went from bad to worse. Already devastated by his wife’s death and suffering from depression, he contracted tuberculosis and began to deteriorate physically as well as emotionally. His family sent him to Colorado, where it was believed the high altitude might improve his condition. But he had already given up on life and his condition continued to worsen. When it became apparent her son was not long for the world, Fanny boarded a train for Colorado and took Robert home so he could spend his few remaining days with his family. When he saw his son for the first time in almost two years, he felt great remorse for having blamed him for his wife’s death. He spent his last days getting to know Ralph, then died in the early hours of 25 October 1909. His sister Maude would later say he had died of a broken heart.

Robert’s brother Alexander, known to family and friends as Sandy, had his own problems. As a result of a terrible accident at the steel plant, Sandy had a steel plate put in his head; it seems he was never the same after that. While still a young man he left his parents’ home and headed west, drifting from place to place. He ended up in Seattle, Washington, where he married twice. He and his first wife, Katherine, had a daughter named Barbara. Sandy died in Seattle on 19 September 1952, leaving a widow named Bertha, a stepson, and his daughter, who married a police officer and became Barbara Cook. In the early 90s she and her husband drove across North America and visited my father, her first cousin.

The elder MacVay daughter, Maude, stayed in Sydney and married William L. Totten, whose family owned a construction company. Will and Maude lived down the street at number 47 (maybe it was 41), where they would spend the rest of their lives. They never had any children, perhaps because Maude was very stern and conservative (I’m told she went into the closet to change her clothes; the fact that she and will had no children may have resulted from the fact that he hardly ever got anywhere near her). Maude died on 22 may 1955.

I think this photo was taken in the late 1920s. From left to right: William, Frances, Maude, and my grandfather, Frank. I think the guy in the car is Maude's husband, Will Totten.

Armour married Ambrose Higgs, brother of Robert’s wife Bessie, and they had five daughters. They moved out west, to Hythe, Alberta, but Ambrose left Armour to fend for herself and her five girls. Armour became a Jehovah’s Witness shortly after that (it was probably Jehovah’s Witnesses who cared for her when she was abandoned by Ambrose). I tracked down one of those daughters, Olive, through her mother’s 1964 obituary. Olive was an invaluable source of information on the MacVay family and was able to give me precious firsthand accounts of the lives of people I had only known from photos and old documents. If I recall correctly, it was Olive who put me in touch with our cousin Joe Flewelling in New Brunswick, another great source of information and anecdotes.

Kirk MacVay, like his brother Sandy, left Cape Breton Island after high school and moved to the US. He ended up working in a coal mine somewhere in Pennsylvania, where he was killed in an explosion in the late 1920s or early 1930s. At least that’s one version of the story. According to my aunt Edna, Maude and Will told her Kirk had been killed in an explosion while welding an oil tank somewhere in the western US, maybe Oklahoma (if that’s true, he wouldn’t be the only person with a family name like ours to blow something up in Oklahama). His story remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of my family history. As far as I know, he never married or had children, though Edna says he married and had a couple of kids. That presents an intriguing possibility: that there could be more MacVays out there to whom we’re somewhat closely related.

Ralph MacVay, the grandson that William and Fanny raised as a son, also moved to the US in his teens (having been born in Buffalo, he was an American citizen and moved there before reaching the age of majority so he could retain his citizenship). He spent many years in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he worked in the boys’ wear department at MacArtney’s, the shop owned by his uncle (actually his granduncle), Fanny’s brother Robert MacArtney. Ralph was married to a woman named Anne; she died and he remarried, but never had any children. I think he spent his retirement years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

William MacVay worked as a foreman bricklayer at the steel plant until he was 81 or 82 years old, when failing health forced him to retire. He moved in with Maude and Will at 41 George Street, where he died on 19 June 1932 at the age of 88 (though it could have been 87, since I’m not 100% certain what year he was born). Fanny also died at Maude’s house, on 26 June 1935, at the relatively young age of 72, apparently of breast cancer. According to her obituary, the First United Church choir sang two of her favourite songs at her funeral, Nearer My God to Thee and Come to the Saviour.

So what about Frank? For his story you’ll have to wait for Part Three.

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.