Mac Dhunléibhe
The clan that gave the world David Livingstone — and a surname that explored every continent
Livingstone is a clan of Linlithgowshire in the Scottish Lowlands, with a history stretching from medieval lordship to the most famous explorer of the Victorian age.
The Livingstone family takes its name from the barony of Livingston in Linlithgowshire (modern West Lothian), west of Edinburgh. The place name itself derives from a Flemish settler named Leving, and the family who held the barony took the locational surname in the usual medieval fashion. The Livingstones appear in Scottish records from the twelfth century and rose to considerable power in the fifteenth century.
Sir Alexander Livingstone of Callendar was one of the most powerful figures in Scotland during the minority of James II in the 1430s and 1440s, effectively ruling the kingdom alongside the Chancellor Crichton in a period of intense noble rivalry. The Livingstones' political dominance was eventually broken by James II himself, who executed several family members and forfeited their estates — a reminder of the volatility of medieval Scottish noble politics.
The Earls of Linlithgow, created in the early seventeenth century, represented the family's later peak of influence. The sixth Earl of Linlithgow was one of the leading Scottish Jacobites in the 1715 rising, and the family's attachment to the Stuart cause in the eighteenth century, combined with forfeiture after the failed risings, effectively ended the landed Livingstone family as a major political force.
A separate family of Livingstones in the Scottish Highlands — Mac Dhunléibhe in Gaelic — were hereditary physicians to the MacLeans of Mull. These Livingstone physicians were among the most skilled Gaelic medical practitioners, maintaining a hereditary tradition of medicine that predated the modern medical profession by centuries. Their connection to Mull is why the name Livingstone appears in Argyll and the Western Isles in addition to its Lowland heartland.
David Livingstone (1813–1873), born in Blantyre in Lanarkshire to a working-class family of Ulva (an island off Mull) origin, became the most celebrated explorer and missionary of the Victorian age. His explorations of central and southern Africa — including the first European sighting of Victoria Falls (which he named for the Queen) and his search for the source of the Nile — made him a Victorian hero. Henry Morton Stanley's famous greeting — "Dr Livingstone, I presume?" — upon finding the missing explorer on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1871 is one of the most quoted sentences in English. Livingstone died in Zambia in 1873 and is buried in Westminster Abbey, his heart buried in Africa as he had requested.
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