John Robert MacKie McKay

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Robert MacKie McKay (1694–1765), a 7× great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Scottish birth, parentage, migration from Galloway to Ulster, and the single recorded child carrying the line forward. Notable: represents the Scots-Irish Presbyterian migration from southwest Scotland to the north of Ireland during the early 18th century.

John Robert MacKie McKay was born on the 11th of November, 1694, at Larg in the parish of Minnigaff, Kirkcudbright, in the southwestern lowlands of Scotland. He was the son of John Robert McKie (1665–1710) and Ester Hawthorn (1672–1768), the latter a woman of remarkable longevity who is recorded as having survived nearly a full century. The MacKie surname, with its many variants, was long established among the hill country and coastal parishes of Galloway, where Presbyterian conviction ran deep and where the religious controversies of the seventeenth century had left their mark upon nearly every family of standing.

John Robert came of age in a Scotland still recovering from the upheavals of the Covenanting years and the Glorious Revolution, and freshly joined to England by the Act of Union of 1707. For families of the Galloway coast, the short crossing to the north of Ireland — already begun in earnest under the Ulster Plantation of the previous century — offered land, opportunity, and the freedom to worship within the Presbyterian discipline. It was such a passage that John Robert appears to have made in the course of his life, for he died in 1765 at Coleraine, in County Londonderry, on the northern coast of Ireland. Coleraine in that era was a thriving market town along the River Bann, populated heavily by Scots settlers and their descendants, and bound by trade and faith to the Galloway shore from which his own forebears had come.

Of his marriage, the record preserved in this archive notes one son, James McKee (1735–1794), through whom the line descended. The variant spelling of the son's surname reflects the fluidity of orthography common to that age, when names were rendered as the ear caught them and the clerk transcribed them.

John Robert MacKie McKay stood as a 7× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather line.