ABSTRACT
This essay addresses family history in the very short term, as family formation or the failure thereof reflects political disorder, war, and the emergence of a new society. This, plus illegitimacy, murder, and encroaching textile production can be seen in the parish of Comrie, in Perthshire between 1745 and 1749.1 Briefly, in 1749 Alexander McCowan killed Margaret Mckial and their three-year-old daughter. He had persuaded Mckial to follow him, ostensibly in search of harvest work, by promising to marry her when they reached Edinburgh. The road ended for Mckial and her child at the wester park of Pitkellony, an estate then in the hands of David Drummond, a lesser member of the Jacobite family of Drummond headed by the duke of Perth. Much of the surrounding territory was Drummond land, although forfeit in 1749 as retaliation for the Duke’s steadfast loyalty to the Stuart monarchs in exile and in rebellion.2 The forfeited land sheltered a number of men, both local and from well to the north, who had been out in the great rising of 1745. Alexander McCowan was quite probably one of them; the road ended for him, not at Culloden or any other battle, but on the gallows in Perth shortly after the murder.
