John Laird of Larg Mckay (Mckie)

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Laird of Larg Mckay (Mckie) (1640–1721), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Scottish birth in Wigtownshire, his parents Patrick and Jane Gordon McKie, marriage to Elizabeth Dunbar, his son John Robert, and his death in 1721. Notable: Scottish Lowlands origin with possible later New England connection.

John Laird of Larg Mckay, also rendered Mckie in the older orthographies of the family papers, was born in 1640 in the parish of Penninghame, Wigtownshire, in the southwestern Lowlands of Scotland. He was the son of Patrick James McKie (1620–1720) and Jane Gordon McKee (1620–1677), placing him within the McKie kindred long associated with the lands of Larg in Galloway. The designation "of Larg" preserved in his name marks him as a laird, or landholder, of that district — a style of identification customary among the lesser Scottish gentry of the seventeenth century, by which a man was known as much by his estate as by his surname.

The Wigtownshire of John's youth was a country shaped by religious turbulence. The decades following his birth encompassed the Covenanter struggles and the period later remembered in Galloway as the Killing Time, during which the Lowland parishes saw considerable upheaval. Whether John remained settled upon the family lands or was caught up in the broader currents of emigration that carried so many Scots across the Atlantic in that era cannot be stated with certainty; the family records preserve a dual tradition, noting his death on 24 February 1721 either in Lyme, New London County, Connecticut, or in Scotland itself. Both possibilities reflect the wider pattern of Scottish dispersal in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

John married Elizabeth Dunbar, a union joining two names of long standing in the Scottish Lowlands. To them was born a son, John Robert McKie (1665–1710), through whom the line continued. John outlived his son by more than a decade, and, by the family reckoning, his own father Patrick as well — a remarkable span of generations.

John Laird of Larg Mckay stood as a 9× great-grandfather of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, a distant but firmly recorded forebear in the family's Scottish ancestry.