David Dobson

This is the second volume by David Dobson focusing on 18th-century inhabitants of the Grampian Highlanders. It is part of a larger series by Mr. Dobson designed to identify the origins of Scottish Highlanders who traveled to America prior to the Great Highland Migration that began in the 1730s and intensified thereafter. In all cases, Mr. Dobson gives each Highlander's name, a locality within the Northern Isles (place of birth, residence, employment, etc.), a date, and the source. In some cases, we also learn the identities of relatives, the individual's employment, vessel traveled on, and so forth.

In 1715 and again in 1745, a significant number of rebellious Scottish Jacobites could be found in the North East, an area dominated by Episcopalian landowners allied to the House of Stuart. This work identifies 2,000 North East Jacobites of 1715 and 1745, any number of whom either fled to France or were forcibly transported to the New World (to Maryland and Virginia, in particular). While the details vary, the biographical notices, in the aggregate, mention the individual's dates of birth and death, the names or number of his family members, his town of origin, where he participated in the rebellion, and what became of him after the insurrection was put down (capture, imprisonment, execution, transportation, or flight). All in all, this is an important effort at historical preservation and a source of potential clues on eighteenth-century Scottish forebears.