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Stories on Searching for Scottish Ancestors ...........Rob Roy and the Clockmaker MacGregor was my father's middle name - Thomas MacGregor Thomson. So are you related to Rob Roy? I used to ask him in boyish hope. He would smile at his son's eagerness to be a rebel, and say well, yes, could be. But the truth is he had not a clue as to why why he had been called MacGregor. So Rob Roy was left to fade from the scene, leaving me to grow up. Several years after my father's death, I felt the urge to explore my family origins, as so many of us do. After a day of exploring in the portals of Register House in Edinburgh the piece of information that intrigued me most was my father's grandmother's maiden name - McGregor. So was it really Rob Roy at last?! In fact I was soon to find out my McGregor ancestors were indeed of some note, not as romantic Highland clansmen, but rather as skilled clockmakers in the Border county of Berwickshire. Thomas McGregor was born in Duns in 1786 , became apprenticed to a clockmaker there, then married and moved to Ayton village to start his own business, making and repairing clocks and watches. He became a master clockmaker , especially of longcase clocks, as I was soon to discover. While thumbing through a library copy of Miller's Antique Clocks and Barometers, I came across a picture of a fine longcase clock by McGregor of Ayton, circa 1810. So my great great great grandfather MacGregor made grandfather clocks. Yes, that will do. Shame my Dad never knew that! The irony is I remember that one of my father's proudest possessions was the large polished mahogany longcase clock which stood tick-tocking away in the front room, striking on the hour, every hour. He would check the pendulums and carefully wind up the clock every Sunday night. Was it a McGregor of Ayton clock? I doubt it, but there are some things we may never know. What I do know is that after his death the clock was appropriated by a second-hand furniture dealer who offered £8 pounds for it. What would it be worth now? About £3000 to £4000 pounds I should say. That's not quite the end of the story. I traced back the McGregor family in Berwickshire and found they went back a long way. There was a Peter McGrigor born 1708 in a Berwickshire parish. The McGregor Clan Society admitted they were completely unaware of these McGregors from Berwickshire and were surprised that they had been in that county for so long. McGregors certainly controlled the cattle trade over many routes in the early 1700's in Scotland , and the belief now is that a number of clansmen came to Berwickshire to direct the cattle trade between Scotland and England. What goes around comes around and suddenly my real McGregor ancestors start to look once more like my boyhood imaginings of Rob Roy McGregor ..................................................................................................................................................... This article by Dr Brian Thomson of Scot Roots was first published on the web in the Scottish Radiance magazine in November 2000.
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