More on Septs

[MacSpadger]

I'd started a thread earlier about the origins of Scottish clan septs, as they are understood today. I’ve been thinking again about this clan and sept business owing to reading some papers that, although very old, are new to me.
As I’ve said before, when I was very young, I mean when I was around 5 or 6, I was told that my surname meant I was part of a sept of MacDonnell of Glengarry. In most books about septs my family name is listed as a sept of MacDonnell of Glengarry, sure enough.

When I was 10, however, I changed schools and began to learn and speak Gaelic as part of the curriculum. There, while in Gaelic class, I was known as Adhamh MacAlasdair. I have since been addressed in other Gaelic groups as MacAlisdair. This got me wondering why my surname, Sanderson, was not considered a MacAlisdair/MacAlister name instead of MacDonnell.

So, where does the "sept" biz come from? Why have I been wearing a tartan for over 40 years that I might not have any real connection to?

I got in contact with the clan chief of the MacDonells of Glengarry and he was very friendly indeed. He wrote back that the clan historian, Norman H MacDonald, was adamant that Sanderson was one of the principal septs. He also gave full rights and permissions to wear any related tartans and accoutrements, etc. Very pleasant man, doon here they’d call him a decent chap.

I was looking at some papers later on an unrelated matter and found some writings by a member of the Gordon Fencibles on the mental problems of clan chief Alasdair MacDonell of Glengarry in 1800. Glengarry was possibly schizophrenic or bipolar by today’s standards. He did many bizarre things which I won’t go into here, but one was to severely beat a servant. The servant was also called Alasdair MacDonell from Glengarry, but the writing showed he was called Sanders to avoid confusion with the chief. Later papers from a court case name him as Alasdair MacDonell from Glengarry, known as Saunders. From here it’s fairly easy to imagine that a Sanderson/Saunderson name might have sprung, but we are talking 1800, which is comparatively recently in historical terms, and the servant was referred to verbally as Sanders/Saunders, but in writing was still called Alasdair MacDonell from Glengarry. Confusing.

A couple of weeks later I was looking at court records from the inquest after the Massacre of Glencoe. These records are important because the names of the ill fated MacDonald clan are listed.
Members of the Clan MacDonald of Glencoe included MacAlasdair, MacEanruig, (MacHenry/ Henderson), MacStarken, Robertson, Rankin, Don, Matheson, Kennedy, MacIntyre and several other common Scottish names. All of these people counted themselves as Glencoe people with their chief/laird being Alastair Maclain, 12th Chief of Glencoe. Yet if you were to enter these names into a modern list of “septs” there would be no indication of this.

The troops who committed the atrocity were not all Campbells, again they have a diverse range of common Scottish surnames.

My mother’s maiden name is Gill and I have been succesfull in tracing my branch of the Gills back to the 1600’s. Two of them fought at Culloden in Gordon of Glenbucket's regiment. They are both listed as tenants of the Duke of Gordon, so no doubt would have been considered part of Clan Gordon, yet post Victorian books seem to list Gill as a sept of the Clan MacDonald. All this seems academic as this line of Gills is descended from a man who was called Grigor M’Grigor but changed his surname to Gill, (or became known as Gill), when he settled around Banff in the 1600’s and became a stonemason. That’s my G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-Grandfather, and he could possibly have been an outlawed MacGregor, hence the arrival in a new area and the name change. But according to current lists of Septs, he would have been a MacDonald.

I am becoming more and more convinced that the term sept is entirely misleading. People of any name, (both Highland and Lowland, as we can see from the Glencoe records), could end up in any clan depending entirely on location and circumstance.
In the 1930's book Clans, Septs & Regiments of the Scottish Highlands Thomas Innes says “septs must be regarded as a rather wonderful effort of imagination” and “The very word ‘sept’ is delusive and no serious attention can now be attached to Skene’s theories about ‘septs”.

Here he means Dr. W. F. Skene's hugely influential book, The Highlanders of Scotland or his later work, Celtic Scotland. These are full of invention/crap, (take your pick).

I suppose a modern day analogy would be simply living in a town. If you have parents who were born and raised in Greentown, but then move to Bluetown where you are born and raised, that does not make you a Greentownian. Likewise for your offspring if you then move to Browntown or Redtown to raise them.
The whole concept of septs seem fluid, flexible and entirely dictated to by circumstance, and I can’t see any way that it can be contained in a fixed list of names.