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Hi Karen:
Just read your McNokaird
article and a nice piece of work it is. Congratulations! It is
really very good.
I would add as a codicil to your thesis, however, the
following:
Alexander MacLean
Sinclair was an amazingly well-connected, well-respected scholar both in English
and in Gaelic. His work was published both here and in Scotland at the
turn of the century (His 500 page tome on the MacLeans is still in use today)
and it is a remarkable achievement when one also considers that the man grew up
on an impoverished farm in one of the poorest counties in Nova Scotia (still
is). This does not mean that he could not be wrong nor does it mean that
we do not have new information that he did not possess. But......I do not
have the Gaelic and I do not know if you do but it would be nervy of me to
contradict Professor Sinclair (a native Gaelic speaker and Gaelic academician)
even 100 years after the fact and state categorically "The Sinclairs
of Argyll were not shinglers". Similarly, I will not argue with
your thesis that they must have been smiths. "Craftmen" or
"people of the craft" I would like to think might include shinglers
and if you don't think there's an art to shingling, try doing your own roof next
time it needs one. There is veritable skill in roofing and I should know, I am a
contractor and I value my roofers as my brothers.
Professor Sinclair, I think would agree with your general
thesis that the Argyll Sinclairs are a different "kettle of fish" and
the proof of that is his statement that they are "out-and-out
Highlanders". My opinion is, as I have said elsewhere, that a
connection may well be there between the Rosslyn-Caithness Sinclairs and those
of Argyll but that opionion and 5 cents would have bought you a coffee in
1946. Whatever the truth of the connection or not, our Argyll brothers and
sisters are members of our family and nothing can change that.
Juli's remark is on the money when in response to
"Sinclair's by mistake" she responds that, looked at another
way, Norman Sinclairs have no claim to be Highland.
Yours
aye,
Rory
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