Eilidh macdonald biography of nancy

Little is known of the early life of Helen MacDonald or Nelly, as she was always called. She obviously received some sort of formal education, for she wrote fluent English as well as Gaelic.

Eilidh macdonald biography of nancy: My boy committed suicide, he

The family, led by eldest brother John , who arrived the following year, was attempting to create a Highland Catholic colony on the Island, partly to recoup its fortune and partly to help relieve religious persecution and economic oppression in the Highlands. Nelly and her sister shared in all the difficulties and privations of pioneering in unfamiliar wilderness.

By the opening of the American rebellion in , the little settlement on Lot 36 — centred at Scotchfort — had taken hold. The MacDonald brothers were desperately short of money, however, and, although Catholics, they were commissioned in the Royal Highland Emigrants 84th Foot , a regiment recruited for American service during the war. Both had left the Island before the end of , Donald never to return he was killed in battle in and John to remain away until , occupied first by the war and then in Britain by political struggles related to the Island.

Nelly and her sister had planned to leave the Island during the war for a more congenial location, but they never did. With her brothers absent, supervision and management of the settlement and of the MacDonald interests on the Island devolved upon Nelly. Such responsibilities, when men were away at war or on business, were not at all unusual for women of the time, their magnitude depending on the extent of the family holdings involved.

For MacDonald was not merely a landholder with a large farm; he was a self-conscious Highland laird known in Gaelic as Fear-a-Ghlinne, the lord of the glen with a considerable number of dependent tenants for whom he felt responsible. As a proprietor, moreover, he was threatened by the machinations of the official clique that controlled the Island.