Elizabeth Dunbar

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Dunbar (1633–1720), a 9× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in Scotland, marriage into the McKie family of Larg, her son and descendants, and the historical context of 17th-century Kirkcudbrightshire. Notable: deep Scottish Lowland ancestry of the Hyten line.

Elizabeth Dunbar was born in the year 1633 in the parish of Minnigaff, Kirkcudbrightshire, in the rugged southwestern Lowlands of Scotland. She lived a long life of some eighty-seven years, passing on the 22nd of February, 1720, in the same Kirkcudbrightshire countryside that had cradled her infancy. Her life thus spanned nearly the whole of the seventeenth century — an age of profound turbulence in Scotland, marked by the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the Covenanting struggles that bore heavily upon the southwest shires, the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and at last the Union of the Scottish and English Parliaments in 1707. Kirkcudbrightshire, with its broad moors, sea-lochs, and Presbyterian conviction, was among the regions most touched by these upheavals, and Elizabeth's long years would have witnessed them in their full unfolding.

She was united in marriage to John Laird of Larg McKay, more commonly rendered McKie, a man of standing in the McKie family seated at Larg. The designation "Laird of Larg" denoted a landed proprietor in the Scottish manner, and Elizabeth's marriage thus joined the Dunbar name with one of the established surnames of Galloway.

Of this union was born a son, John Robert McKie, in the year 1665. Through him the line was carried forward; he in his turn passed from this life in 1710, predeceasing his mother by a full decade — a sorrow not uncommon in an era when longevity such as Elizabeth's was the rarer gift.

Elizabeth Dunbar stands at a considerable remove from the present generation, yet her name endures in the careful reckoning of the family register. She was a ninth great-grandmother of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, and one of the early Scottish progenitors from whom the Hyten family descends.