Homecoming and Ancestral Tourism: Clan Gatherings, Genealogy and Homecoming 2009

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Figures for the economic impact of Homecoming and the size of the diaspora come from government and tourism bodies and are estimates. Claims about the diaspora's size vary widely and are labelled accordingly.

Looking for roots

established Millions of people in North America, Australasia and elsewhere have Scottish ancestors who emigrated over the past three centuries. Many visit Scotland to trace their families, using parish registers, census records and statutory records of births, marriages and deaths. The ScotlandsPeople website, launched in 2002, and the ScotlandsPeople Centre in Edinburgh, opened in 2008, provide access to these records.

Coming home before tourism

established Long before ancestral tourism, many emigrants came back for good. The historian Marjory Harper, in Adventurers and Exiles (2003), calls the returning exile "the Cinderella of Scottish diaspora studies" and notes that more than a third of Scotland's emigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century returned. Many had never meant to stay: Caribbean planters, East India Company officers, Hudson's Bay Company servants from Orkney and Lewis on five-year contracts, and tradesmen who followed wages across the Atlantic. In the 1870s and 1880s around 200 Aberdeen granite tradesmen left each spring for American quarries, and many came back each winter, travelling in groups both ways.

shared Harper argues that return was more often planned, and a mark of success, than a retreat in failure, since the bankrupt or ill often lacked the means to come home. Returning wealth left its mark on Scotland. Sir Hector Munro commissioned the Fyrish monument above Evanton in 1792, modelled on a gate at Negapatnam in India; over £90,000 of Indian money funded Dr Gray's Hospital and the Anderson Institute in Elgin; the Bombay merchant John Forbes bought back his family's estates in Strathdon; and the fur trader William Tomison founded a school for poor children in South Ronaldsay. Lord Strathcona, who left Forres in 1838 and rose to govern the Hudson's Bay Company, bought an estate in Glencoe.

established Others came home briefly, foreshadowing the modern visitor. Harper quotes a Skye-born sheep farmer in New South Wales who in 1864 would go home only to see his mother, and Winnipeg ward maids who returned to Aberdeen in 1895 to persuade friends to join them in Canada.

Where roots tourists go

shared The historian T. M. Devine, in To the Ends of the Earth (2011), notes how far roots tourism follows the Highland image rather than family history. VisitScotland figures he cites show about 70 per cent of "roots tourists" visiting the western Highlands and the Grampians, whatever their ancestry; one study found visitors whose roots lay in Kelso or Peebles feeling more in touch with their heritage on Skye. Many come to see Jacobite battlefields and clan country, and Culloden in particular is treated as a sacred place, the start of a chain leading to the Clearances and to their own ancestors' emigration. Devine names John Prebble as still the most widely read historian among Scottish-Americans, followed by the novelist Nigel Tranter and, more recently, Diana Gabaldon's Outlander novels.

shared The pull of genealogy grew with the internet. Devine dates the American heritage revival to the 1950s, when Dame Flora MacLeod of MacLeod visited the United States in 1953 and appealed to the diaspora to "Come back to Scotland", and links its later growth to the 1976 bicentennial, Alex Haley's Roots and the spread of family history online in the 1990s. The ScotlandsPeople website, with some 80 million records, gave a further boost.

Pilgrims, not tourists

shared The anthropologist Paul Basu, in "Pilgrims to the Far Country", his chapter of Transatlantic Scots (2005), joined people of Scottish descent from North America and elsewhere on journeys to their ancestors' places, often driving them and staying in the same bed-and-breakfasts. He argues that these visitors rarely think of themselves as tourists. Many describe their trips as pilgrimages or quests, and one Canadian woman told him, "I am not and never will be a tourist in Scotland." Basu criticised the Scottish Executive and the tourist board, which had identified roots tourism as a niche market in 2000, for relying on visitor profiles while failing to ask why people make these journeys.

shared For many, Basu found, the Clearances serve as an origin myth: the injustice that explains why the family left. Many Scottish Americans are sure their ancestors were pushed rather than pulled, whether or not the record bears it out. One Ohio visitor, Don, who could not trace his great-grandfather beyond a death certificate, still came to believe his family had been cleared from Strathnaver, while admitting that all he knew of the Clearances came from the historians Ian Grimble and John Prebble. Basu's point is not that such visitors are wrong but that identity does not depend on the family tree being proved.

established The journeys could be precise. Two sisters from Washington State, Bonnie and Pat, traced their great-grandparents Malcolm Matheson and Margaret Buchanan, who left Lewis for Canada in 1870. With help from the Western Isles genealogist Bill Lawson and a local historical society, they found cousins in Uig and on Bernera, the ruined family blackhouse at Bostadh, abandoned in the 1870s, and the cairn built in 1992 to commemorate the Bernera Riot of 1874. Bonnie told Basu that she felt "webbed" for the first time. A Canadian visitor, Brenda, left a ring in the walls of Dun Ringill on Skye, which Basu compares to a pilgrim's offering at a shrine.

shared Basu concludes that the sense of belonging these visitors find has, in the end, little to do with Scotland itself: the homeland is partly a product of the diaspora's imagination. He also notes that some people in Scotland greet such feelings with embarrassed disbelief, which visitors can find hurtful.

A heritage of place: Colonsay

established The anthropologist John W. Sheets, in "Finding Colonsay's Emigrants and a 'Heritage of Place'", his chapter of Transatlantic Scots (2005), follows one small Inner Hebridean island over two centuries. In 1806 the Spencer of Newcastle collected over a hundred islanders at Scalasaig, many of them McMillans, McNeills and Munns from Balnahard in the north, and landed 115 survivors at Pinette Harbour, Prince Edward Island, on 22 September. Later families went to Erin Township in Wellington County, Ontario, from 1831 and to Elderslie Township in Bruce County from 1852, where more than a hundred Colonsay people lie in Rusk's Cemetery. Colonsay had 979 people at its first household census in 1841, 456 in 1871, 313 in 1901 and 137 in 1981.

established Return visits began early. Sheets records the Rev. John J. McNeill of Winnipeg's First Baptist Church standing at his grandfather's empty cottage at Kilchattan in 1905, and Judge Robert McKinnon of Guelph landing at Scalasaig by small boat in 1936 to stay with the daughters of his father's cousin, Donald Mackinnon. Mackinnon, the son of a Colonsay farm labourer, had become the first professor of Celtic at Edinburgh and a member of the Napier Commission. In 1887 he wrote in The Scotsman that on his island "a marriage is a rarer event than a Parliamentary election".

established In the late twentieth century the clan societies arrived. Dr Earle MacPhee of the University of British Columbia revived Clan Macfie, whose medieval chiefs had held Colonsay. In May 1977 members rededicated Macfie's Standing Stone, where tradition says the last chief was executed in 1623; in 1981 the Lord Lyon recognised the clan, and in 1993 it held its clan parliament on the island. Colonsay's website opened in 1999, and its e-newsletter, The Corncrake, invited genealogical queries from descendants overseas.

shared Sheets argues that this quieter "heritage of place", tied to a named ancestor and a precise spot, is as intense as the tartan pageantry of Highland games, and spreads easily over the internet. He asks whether islands can profit from links with their emigrants' descendants while still losing their own young people. He also records the damage a visiting writer could do: the American journalist John McPhee's The Crofter and the Laird (1970), drawn from months living on Colonsay, repeated islanders' private conversations by name and was still resented when Sheets arrived in 1977.

Homecoming 2009

established In 2009, the 250th anniversary of Burns's birth, the Scottish Government and VisitScotland ran Homecoming Scotland, a year-long programme of events designed to encourage people of Scottish descent to visit. Events included Burns celebrations, Highland games, music festivals and clan gatherings.

established Devine records that the idea was first advanced by the Labour-led administration in Edinburgh and taken up by the SNP minority government after 2007. The programme ran about 400 events over ten months. Its stated aims were commercial: a total economic impact of at least £40 million from extra tourist visits, and, by engaging the diaspora, "50,000 new consumer prospects and 2,500 'gatekeeper' contacts". It formed part of a wider policy that included the GlobalScot business network, Global Friends of Scotland, ministerial visits to Tartan Day events in the United States and, from September 2010, a formal Diaspora Engagement Plan.

The Gathering

established The centrepiece was The Gathering, held in Holyrood Park, Edinburgh, in July 2009, with clan tents, Highland games and a large clan parade up the Royal Mile. Tens of thousands attended; Devine gives a figure of more than 47,000. However, the private company that organised it ran into financial difficulties and later went into liquidation, leaving debts to creditors, including public bodies that had lent money, which caused controversy.

Assessing Homecoming

shared The government reported that Homecoming 2009 generated additional visitors and spending; critics questioned the figures and the losses on The Gathering. A second Homecoming in 2014 coincided with the Commonwealth Games and the Ryder Cup.

shared Devine, writing in 2011, called the 2009 Homecoming "controversial and politically divisive", though he accepted that it had a significant effect on visitor numbers. He traces the new official interest in the diaspora to three things: devolution in 1999, which let Scottish ministers pursue their own agenda; tourism, which by 2009 contributed £4.1 billion and supported, directly or indirectly, 219,000 jobs; and alarm at population decline, after a 2004 report found that Scotland's population had fallen by 1 per cent between 1995 and 2001, the only fall in the EU. Ministers also looked to Ireland, whose diaspora had funded the Ireland Funds' $350 million of grants since 1976. Devine noted that Scottish diaspora philanthropy on that scale was almost absent, and quoted a comparison concluding that the Scottish diaspora was "less visible and less well organised" than the Irish.

A two-way relationship

shared Ancestral tourism connects Scotland with people who feel strong ties to it, but historians note that the diaspora's image of Scotland, of clans, tartan and Highland glens, is often romantic and does not always reflect the history of emigration, much of which came from Lowland towns.

shared Harper traces this romantic image to the Highland landscape popularised by Walter Scott and Edwin Landseer, and to its commercial use overseas. Nova Scotia, she writes, began parading its Scottishness in the 1930s as deliberate tourist promotion, later adding the Lone Shieling on the Cabot Trail, which she calls a "completely spurious replica of a Highland settler's home", built of stone and thatch although the emigrants had built in wood. The historian Michael Vance, in Transatlantic Scots (2005), describes it more exactly. It is a shieling, the stone-and-thatch summer hut of the Highlands and Islands, built in 1947 by the geologist Donald S. MacIntosh in homage to the "Canadian Boat Song" and its "lone shieling of the misty island", not a copy of any settler's home. Elsewhere Highland games and Scottish societies were used as "tourist bait" as interest in genealogy grew in the later twentieth century. She argues that powerful Highland memories of eviction have been misleadingly applied to the whole exodus, when by the 1880s most Scottish emigrants came from towns.

• Homecoming 2009 marked Burns's 250th anniversary.
• The Gathering included a clan parade on the Royal Mile.
• The company that ran The Gathering went into liquidation.
• ScotlandsPeople went online in 2002.
• Much Scottish emigration came from the Lowlands, not the Highlands.
• More than a third of Scotland's Victorian emigrants came back home.
• The Lone Shieling in Cape Breton, built in 1947, is a stone-and-thatch Highland summer hut inspired by a line in the "Canadian Boat Song"; Cape Breton's settlers actually built in wood.
• In 1806 one ship, the Spencer, took over a hundred people from the small island of Colonsay to Prince Edward Island.
• Many roots-tourists interviewed by the anthropologist Paul Basu refused to call themselves tourists at all.
• The Fyrish monument above Evanton was paid for by a general returned from India.
• About 70 per cent of roots tourists visit the western Highlands and the Grampians, whatever part of Scotland their ancestors came from.
• Homecoming 2009 set a target of "2,500 'gatekeeper' contacts" among the diaspora as well as visitor spending.

• Disputed: How big the Scottish diaspora is. Estimates are often quoted as tens of millions, but they are rough and depend heavily on definitions.
• Disputed: What Homecoming 2009 achieved. The government reported additional visitors and spending, but critics questioned the figures and the losses on The Gathering. T. M. Devine called the year "controversial and politically divisive", though he accepted that it had a significant effect on visitor numbers.
• Myth: Homecoming was a purely sentimental invitation. Its stated aims were commercial: an economic impact of at least £40 million and 50,000 new "consumer prospects". Devine argues official interest in the diaspora was driven less by sentiment than by tourism revenue and alarm at a shrinking, ageing population.
• Myth: Emigrants left for good. More than a third of Scotland's emigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century came back, and many had always planned to.
• Myth: Highland eviction explains the whole diaspora. Marjory Harper argues that memories of eviction have been misleadingly applied to the whole exodus, when by the 1880s most Scottish emigrants came from towns.
• Myth: The Lone Shieling was a copy of a settler's house. Michael Vance describes it as a Highland shieling, or summer hut, built in 1947 in homage to the "Canadian Boat Song" and its "lone shieling of the misty island". The emigrants themselves had built in wood.
• Disputed: Family Clearance stories. Paul Basu found many Scottish Americans sure that their ancestors were pushed rather than pulled, whether or not the record bears it out. One Ohio visitor who could not trace his great-grandfather beyond a death certificate still believed his family had been cleared.