Elizabeth (Bessie) Leslie

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth (Bessie) Leslie (1631–?), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Edinburgh, her Scottish parentage, her marriage to Alexander Donald McBaith (McVey), her son William, and the broader context of 17th-century Lowland Scotland. Notable: deep Scots lineage seated at Canongate, Edinburgh.

Elizabeth Leslie, known affectionately within the family record as Bessie, was born on the 22nd of April, 1631, in the burgh of Canongate, hard beneath the shadow of Holyrood and the Old Town of Edinburgh, in the county of Midlothian, Scotland. She was the daughter of James Leslie, born in 1603, and of Marion Hendersoune, whose long life stretched from 1615 to 1688. Both surnames were of established Lowland Scots provenance, and Bessie was carried into a household rooted in the civic and parish life of the Scottish capital.

The Canongate of Bessie's childhood was a burgh distinct from Edinburgh proper, though pressed close against its walls — a thoroughfare of merchants, craftsmen, and the lesser gentry who attended at Holyrood Palace. The 1630s in Scotland were years of mounting religious tension, soon to issue in the National Covenant of 1638 and the wars of the three kingdoms that followed. The Edinburgh of her youth was therefore a city of pulpits and proclamations, of plague visitations and Covenanting fervour, conditions which shaped every household of the burgh whether noble or humble.

In the course of time Bessie was joined in marriage to Alexander Donald McBaith, the surname rendered in the family record also as McVey — a union which carried her line out of the strictly Leslie name and into a Highland-derived patronymic more characteristic of the western and northern shires. Of this marriage the archive preserves the name of one son, William McVey, born in 1665, through whom the line descended.

The place and date of Bessie's death are not recorded in the family register, though she is presumed to have ended her days upon Scottish soil, as did her mother before her.

Elizabeth (Bessie) Leslie stood as a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather, or PP, line of descent.