Following the defeat of the Jacobite cause at Culloden in 1746 and the subsequent collapse of the Gaelic order, there was a mass migration of Scots to the New World with Nova Scotia being a primary destination.
I was utterly ignorant of this history until a colleague of mine some 25 years ago told how her family found itself in America.
Culloden was 1745. That was the culmination of the Bonnie Prince Charlie affair and resulted in the flower of Scottish youth being crushed and the end of the clan system, the outlawing of the tartans and, I guess, the beginning of the modern United Kingdom.
My great grand-parents ran from the Brits - rowing out on a cold night to a small sailing ship anchored off-shore of the Isle of Skye. They met and married on the boat, which was heading to Nova Scotia.
It was the third wave of the “Highland Clearances” that they were desperately trying to escape with their very lives, running from the English marauders. Read up on the cruelty of their clearances of the highland clans to see how horrific they treated the Scottish crofters.
After the long voyage across the Atlantic, the young couple made a long trip across Canada to Bruce Mines, Ontario, where my great grandfather worked in the mines. My grandfather was the youngest of their 13 children.
The family all pitched in to help him get an education, so he became a successful metalurgical engineer exploring for rich deposits and developing successful mines across the northern western states, California, then eventually Mexico and all around the world.
He was one of the original founders of Republic Steel in Cleveland, Ohio.
Our histories are wonderfully strange. We stand on the shoulders of brave and strong people, but sometimes I wonder if we are equal to their courage and self-sufficiency.