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Posted by Bobby Thompson
on 10/27/2008, 1:42 am, in reply to "Archibald McRimmon"
Based on years of research into our families the spelling of the name was most often Mac or M' in Scotland when the English version was given. More often than not this almost universally became Mc for emigrants to the US. I have not been able to unravel the conditions under which a name like MacLeod was cited as MacLeod or Macleod but there evidently were traditions for such use of lower or upper case. Now as to the spelling of the last part of our name, some variations were time line related in the old country but far more variation in this country (USA) probably occurred as a result of our forebears being less than "well educated," and often having matters of spelling dependant upon our Scots having Gaelic as their first language while non Scots may well have recorded legal and census data more by phonetic approximations than by true spelling. The same obviously played a role in Scotland as well.
I can just imagine, for example, a non Scot asking a Scot, "what cloth is that across your shoulder? where upon the Scot names it a plaid or a tartan plaid and the non Scot decides that the Scot is referring to the checkered pattern of colors and deciding that a plaid is a checkered pattern.
What do you think about the spelling of our name. My earliest NC and GA ancestor used the McCrimmon spelling but a later generation's emancipated slaves spelled the name as McRimmon. We make far too much of the spelling. In my humble opinion, it should be spelled as our forebears did, no matter what that may have been.
Slainte,
Bobby
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