Williame McVey

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Williame McVey (1665–?), an eighth-great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Edinburgh, parentage, marriage to Anna Thomson, his son William, and historical context regarding late seventeenth-century Scotland. Notable: Scottish ancestry rooted in Canongate, Edinburgh, in the Restoration era.

Williame McVey, born the fourteenth of September, 1665, in Canongate, Edinburgh, in the shire of Midlothian, Scotland, stands among the earliest documented forebears of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather line, holding the position of an eighth-great-grandfather. He entered the world in the parish of Canongate, then a burgh distinct from but closely tied to the old walled city of Edinburgh, lying just beyond the Netherbow Port along the descending High Street that led to the gates of Holyrood Palace. In that year Scotland remained under the restored crown of Charles II, and Canongate, though still bearing the dignity of its ancient abbey origins, had become a quarter of artisans, lawyers, and tradesmen serving the court and the city above.

He was the son of Alexander Donald Mcbaith — the surname rendered McVey in later generations — born in 1623, and of Elizabeth, known familiarly as Bessie, Leslie, born in 1631. The surnames borne by his parents speak to the older Gaelic and Lowland Scots heritage of the family, the patronymic Mcbaith reflecting the orthographic fluidity common to Scottish records of that century, when scribes set down names by ear and by custom rather than by fixed rule.

Williame in due course took to wife Anna Thomson, a union from which issued at least one son recorded in this register: William McVey, born in 1695 and living until 1762, through whom the line descended toward the families that would, in later generations, cross the Atlantic and join the broader currents of the compiler's ancestry. The Thomson name was widespread throughout the Lowlands of Scotland and represents a fitting alliance for a Canongate household of the period.

The year and place of Williame's death have not been preserved in the records gathered here. He stands, nonetheless, as a firm anchor in Edinburgh upon the paternal-grandfather line of the compiler, an eighth-great-grandfather of Scottish birth.