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John McLENNAN
Research notes by Anne Pollitt
The first of our McLennan branch to come to Australia was Kenneth McLennan in 1833. He was
also the earliest of all our forebears to come to this country. Although he was born in England we
generally think of him as a Scot. Camden, NSW, became his home at some time between 1839 and
1848.
KENNETH McLENNAN
Born: 21 November, 1813, Woolwich, bap’d 28 Nov, 1813, Scots Church , Woolwich, Eng.
Died: 17 August, 1903, aged 89, Westbrook near Camden, NSW
Married: (1) 21 March, 1848, aged 34, St John’s C. of E. Church, Camden, to Sarah Gardiner
(2) 25 April, 1870, aged 54, at his home, to Ann Mary Dabinett
Sixteen children:- John, William Henry Thomas, Charles, Louisa, Kenneth, Lucy, Emma, Mary
Ann, Arthur E., John George, Rhoda Jane, Rebecca May, Selina Prudence, Elizabeth A.,
Kenneth Dabinett, Sophia H..
JOHN McLENNAN
Kenneth’s father, John, did not come to Australia. He lived most of his life in Scotland but was in
England for at least a decade. The following information about him comes from Kenneth’s second
marriage certificate, British army records, the 1841 census, the I.G.I. and some Inverness baptism
records.
John McLennan was born in late 1788 in Kintail parish, Ross-shire (PRO ref: WO 97/1248 XC
112242). Kintail is said to be a McLennan area, though on the MacRae website reference is made to
a census in 1793 with the comment that only a few residents of Kintail were not of the MacRae
name. John would have been about 5 at the time of that census. We can only assume that this
‘census’ was the “Statistical Accounts for Scotland” which unfortunately does not include names of
individuals so it does not reveal the names of his parents. Kintail is a beautiful area of Scotland, on
Loch Duich, a region rather than a specific locality. At the confluence of Lochs Duich, Long, and Alsh
is the well-known Eilean Donan Castle. It would have been a ruin when John knew it, as it was
mortared into rubble by government troops in 1719 and was not rebuilt until the 20
th
Century
(MacLeod p. 158).
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Virgin birth by men? There should be exactly the treasure I wanted in the parish registers for Kintail
from 1777 to 1854, since I knew when John was born within a half-year period and that there were
not many McLennans to confuse the issue. Should be, ought to be. But no. In the critical decade the
only births recorded were those of the minister’s own children, plus one other. But those old
ministers were tough. While it appears that the person who actually presented the child for baptism
was the person whose name was recorded, plus sometimes the name of that man’s father as an
identification issue, it is offensive to my mother eyes that the person who did all the hard work of
bearing, birthing, and rearing the child didn’t get a mention. Unless the father had died. Or in the
case of fornication, adultery or incest. The minister wasn’t averse to recording the mother’s name
then.
**** [Where did the LDS find the record in the 1992 IGI of a John McLennan born “about 1784” at
Kintail to ________ McLennan and Mary Macrae? Such an entry does not appear in the Kintail
OPR.]
The triangle that is Kintail is the shoreline, hill, and glen, between Lochs Duich and Long (the two
arms of Loch Alsh) and extending inland to the watershed at the heads of Glen Affric and Glen
Cannoch. The MacKenzies were Lords of Kintail before they became the Earls of Seaforth. It was in
1719 that they chose Eilean Donan and Kintail as their base when trying to raise the Jacobite clans,
and that was the same year the castle was ruined.
Boswell and Johnson visited Kintail a few years before the 1793 census and found the conditions
primitive. Boswell wrote, “We all sat down on a green turf seat at the end of a house, and they
brought us out two wooden dishes of milk. We had there in a circle all about us men, women and
children, all Macraes, Lord Seaforth’s people. Not one of them could speak English.” (quoted on
Macrae website).
John’s home would have been a stone house with a thatched roof, dark and smoky with only a
couple of small windows, close to other such houses. A photo of a clachan in Kintail is reproduced in
the book written by the late Chief Ronald McLennan, showing us the kind of place John may have
lived in. A clachan was a very small township where the people lived while working the land
communally, reallocating strips of land from year to year in the runrig system, this arrangement pre-
dating crofting (MacLeod p. 143).
John became a dyer. MacLeod on p. 289 describes wool dying: wool was washed in streams, and
“dyed from natural colourants – mosses, lichens, soot – in big black three-legged pots, set on open
peat fires by these same streams.” Carding, spinning and weaving were then done inside the black
house, and the finished cloth was ‘fulled’ or tightened in tubs of stale urine.
Black houses were so called because the smoke from the peat burned in the open fires coated the
inside of the house before seeping out through gaps in the thatched roof. Windows were not glazed,
but simply stuffed with sod to keep out cold winds (McPhee pp. 6-7). It would have been difficult or
impossible to keep the cloth clean.
Land tenure in the Highlands had for many years been based on the value of tenants as warriors.
Originally the land belonged to the people in a patriarchal tribal society, but over time and with the