History of the Camerons - 1884 by Alexander Mackenzie F.S.A., Scot.

Cat No.:   CAB0418:

The author during his life, 1838 - 1898, seems to have been a professional historian / author and has many books bearing his name most being histories of Scottish clans or Scottish social history. This is reinforced by the list of subscribers carried by the book meaning it was already paid for before it was published.

Nonetheless it is an impressive piece of work which, after a short introduction on “Origins,” lists the first 24 Clan leaders (or chiefs) giving some details of their lineage and notable achievements. This is followed by 16 chapters, each providing personal information on a particular family which is a part of, or is associated with, the Cameron Clan. The book concludes with three appendices carrying details pertaining to the clan finances, and providing some interesting insights into the relative value of currency at a particular point in time.

This book reports and discusses events which occurred as early as the mid 400s A.D. and clearly ranges through the 1700 and 1800’s but it is always difficult to ascribe a specific cut-off date at which it reported events. In the Preface, however, the author mentions the construction of the index to the book in 1884, so it would be fairly safe to use this date as the latest at which reporting took place.

Family history books are notorious for propagating “romances,” but this book was clearly researched and constructed by an experienced and knowledgeable scholar who would, we hope, be able to detect any significant “straying from the simple truth” on the part of his informants. The author also appears to have had the authority, and so (presumably) cooperation of the Clan’s leaders. He also recognizes some “notable” primary sources in his Preface. Taking all of this into account gives hope that the information contained here can be be given some significant credence. On the other hand our other digital digital book reproduction on this subject, “The Clan Cameron, by John Cameron, our Cat No. CAB0417, calls Chapter 13 in this book into question, where an error of dates seems to have been made. Even the author, in his Preface, recognizes the possibility of errors.

As always this digital edition provides you with an image of every printed page in the book and the printed text has been processed so that your computer can understand it, so allowing you perform computer searches for the occurrences of words or phrases within the text. In the original book we also found a number of newspaper clippings, all relevant to the Camerons, which had been placed there by previous owners of the book. These also have been processed and may be read and searched to provide a bonus over, and above, the already ample contents of the book.

We have extracted the “subjects” from the book’s index and have made an alphabetized list of them available on our (free) Downloads Page. The list is 720 lines long (but some lines may relate to the same person and some relate to a family or group in the family. Nevertheless there are several hundred individual members of, or individual related to, the historical Cameron’s identified.

We want to recognize the generosity and far-sightedness of Cathy, a descendent of the Cameron family in Canada, for allowing us to reproduce her copy of this book so the history and traditions of the Cameron family may live on.

We have provided a free downloadable Index from this book on our Family History Downloads web page. You can also reach this Index by clicking on the following link Index. You can return to this page by closing the Index Page when you are ready to purchase.

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No. of CDs is:  1 ;   Format is:  PDF ;   Searchable?:  YES;

FastFind:  Yes;  ISBN No.:   978-1-927503-27-0 ;