Andro MacBaith

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Andro MacBaith (b. 1599), a tenfold great-grandfather of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Perthshire, Scotland, parentage by Thomas Mcbaith and Isobell Vilsone, and his son Alexander Donald Mcbaith. Notable: early 17th-century Scottish Highland origin and the MacBaith/McVey surname variant carried into later generations.

Andro MacBaith was born in the year 1599 in Perthshire, Scotland, the son of Thomas Mcbaith and Isobell Vilsone. The exact date of his death is not preserved in the family record, though he is believed to have lived out his days in his native Scotland.

Perthshire at the close of the sixteenth century lay at the heart of the Scottish Highlands, a region of glens, lochs, and clan loyalties whose people held tenaciously to kinship, land, and the old tongue. The years of Andro's youth coincided with the reign of James VI of Scotland, who in 1603 ascended the English throne as James I, uniting the two crowns. Religious life in lowland and Highland Perthshire alike was shaped by the Reformed Kirk, though the older customs of the glens persisted alongside the Presbyterian settlement. The surname MacBaith — rendered variously as Mcbaith, McBeth, and in later generations McVey — belonged to that wide stock of Gaelic patronymics whose spellings shifted with each scribe and each generation's drift across the British Isles and, eventually, across the Atlantic.

Of Andro's life little has come down through the intervening centuries beyond the essential facts of his lineage. He was the father of Alexander Donald Mcbaith, born in 1623 and recorded under the variant surname McVey, through whom the line descended toward the family's eventual passage to the New World. Whether Andro himself married more than once, what trade or holding sustained him, and the circumstances of his passing remain unknown to the compiler.

Yet his place in the family's memory is not on that account diminished. Standing at the headwaters of the paternal-grandfather line, he represents the Scottish root from which a long branch of the family was drawn. Andro MacBaith was the compiler's tenfold great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.