About the Authors

Douglas Kelly grew up in Lumberton and Moore County, North Carolina, studying Gaelic as part of his BA at Chapel Hill. A scholarship from the St. Andrew's Society of New York enabled him to further his interest in his Scottish ancestry during his doctoral work in Theology at the University of Edinburgh. He currently holds the Jordan Chair of Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte. His wife, Caroline, who is originally from England and whose only Celtic blood is Irish, teaches Latin. Douglas is a member of the North Carolina St. Andrew's Society and a director of Scottish Heritage USA, the American arm of the National Trust of Scotland. He has also authored The Malcolm Kelly Family of Moore County, North Carolina and The Scottish Blue Family as well as several theological titles, including Preachers with Power, Four Stalwarts of the Old South, Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World, and more recently, Creation and Change. He and Caroline previously collaborated on If God Already Knows, Why Pray?
Douglas and Caroline and their five children, Douglas II, Martha McCrummen Fraser, Angus Robertson III, Daniel IV and Patrick Blue McMillan Campbell live in the Pee Dee area of the Carolinas, surrounded by their thousands of cousins of Scottish descent.

Reminiscing about events and people that prompted his interest in writing about his Highland Scottish heritage, Douglas writes in the Preface:

An eighteenth century English traveler in the Highlands of Scotland remarked that the people had, "...a pride in their family, as almost every one is a genealogist." That was still much the case in the Cape Fear Valley region of Eastern North Carolina where I was reared in the nineteen forties and fifties. That section of the Eastern Seaboard was well aware of its Scottish roots and was also deeply marked by the Southern loyalty to the extended family. In neighborhood, church and school, I was surrounded by people who were proud of their Scottish Highland surnames and could easily trace their pedigree back for two hundred years.
During the summers from the time I was age five until my last year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I lived on the old family farm which had been granted to my father's Highland emigrant ancestors, shortly before the Revolutionary War, and had been inhabited by their descendants ever since. In that quiet, and at that time fairly remote section of Moore County, I learned not only about farm life from my father's Aunt Maude and Uncle Bill, and his maiden sister, Aunt Margaret, but also about our family heritage in the local Carolina Sandhills and in the far away Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland.
During those last years of the small family farm economy, there was still a great deal of neighborhood visiting with long conversations on the front porch, not to mention the talking that was done while working in the tobacco packhouse or in the cotton field. Most of the surrounding land holders of that section - and to a large degree throughout central and Southern Moore County - were related by blood or marriage, being descended from the same Scottish emigrant families, and most of them tended to be members of the various Presbyterian Churches of the area. Thus they had much in common to talk about and to bind them together.
When my bride (a native of England) came to live in these parts, she noticed how very much shared experience and history these people had, how much they seemed to know about each other and their past, and how they tended to discuss not so much politics, cultural events and contemporary ideas as family concerns and interests - both current and historical - as well as church, economy and school, in that order.
In addition to immediate relatives, many of the people who surrounded me in the Moore County of the nineteen fifties, knew, loved and discussed the details of the lives and times of our Carolina and Highland ancestors in a way that was fascinating to me, a grammar school boy.
I think of Cousins Rozella McLeod, Neill T. Blue, Great-Uncle and Aunt Will and Mazie McLean Blue, and others too numerous to mention, who, while visiting, often sat on the east corner of the long front porch of the old Patrick Blue home in order to make the most of the shade of the tall pine trees and catch the breeze that tended to blow on that side of the house.
They spoke of persons and events in these very fields and woods going back to the Reconstruction and War Between the States and indeed of the American Revolution and the first settlement of these Sandhills as though it were yesterday and almost as though our remote forefathers could be called out of the next room in the old house or perhaps summoned from the family burial plots in Union and Bethesda Churchyards to tell their story. So, at the early age of twelve, I wrote my first family history, and since then have continued to learn and collect all I could on the Scottish Highland families of Moore County and of the entire Cape Fear Valley.
These genealogical and historical interests were greatly stimulated when I went to Edinburgh for doctoral studies in the late nineteen sixties and early seventies. While there, grand old Dame Flora MacLeod of MacLeod kindly befriended me, and I frequently visited my distant Kelly cousins in the Isle of Skye, who shared an appreciation of our mutual heritage as well as a strong commitment to the Christian Faith.
Hand in hand with the discovery of new family connections, my understanding of Highland history was greatly expanded as I studied Gaelic under the Rev. William Matheson of the Celtic Department of Edinburgh University. Many have considered him to have the greatest genealogical knowledge of the families of Highland Scotland of any person alive today. He explained the basic events and movements that were afoot during the time our Carolina ancestors emigrated from their ancient homeland, and he put me in touch with many sources, both well known and obscure, which helped to answer many questions that had been in my head since childhood, and gave me many fruitful leads for tracing the lines of particular forebears.
Then in later years when I served as a minister in the Presbyterian Churches of Raeford, North Carolina and afterwards in Dillon, South Carolina, my congregations were largely composed of the same Highland Carolina families of which I was a part. During pastoral visitation, I learned much not only about these people and their forefathers, but about my own roots, since we were frequently descended from the same emigrant heads of families. Thus an early childhood interest has been (in my view at least) providentially encouraged by the direction in which my own life and professional training and labors have flowed.
But enough of personal reminiscences! Suffice it to say that this little book is the fruit of many years of casual conversation, serious research and fairly wide reading and travel in Carolina and in Scotland. I have written it this summer [1989] in honor of the 250th Anniversary of the first major settlement of Highland Scots in North Carolina: the Argyll Colony which made its home in the Upper Cape Fear Valley in 1739.
My goal is to help clarify the reasons why these people - and tens of thousands of other Highland Scots - left their homeland and settled in eighteenth century Carolina, and to assist future genealogical research and publication on the Cape Fear Scots families by including brief genealogical notices, along with indications of where further information may be gained, on as many of these families as possible.