Clan Nicolson

Origins and Name

The Nicolsons — in Gaelic, Clann 'ic Neacail — were the hereditary bardic family of Clan Donald, the Lords of the Isles. Their seat was on the Isle of Skye, primarily in the Scorrybreck district on the northern shore of the Braes peninsula. As hereditary bards, the Nicolsons held an honoured position in the Gaelic learned orders: they were responsible for preserving and transmitting the oral tradition of the clan — genealogies, praise poems, historical narratives — in the manner of the ancient Irish filidh.

The variant spelling MacNicol represents the same family. The two spellings diverged through the anglicisation of Gaelic names: Nicolson being the anglicised form preferred in the Lowlands and by church scribes, MacNicol the form retained in Gaelic-speaking communities.

The Diaspora

The Nicolson diaspora is strongly associated with the nineteenth-century Clearances. Skye was one of the most heavily cleared regions of the Highlands: crofting communities were evicted wholesale from fertile coastal land to make way for sheep, and many Nicolsons emigrated to Canada — particularly to Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, where Gaelic was spoken as a community language until the mid-twentieth century.

In Australia, Nicolsons appear in the Victorian goldfield records of the 1850s. The family is particularly well-represented in New Zealand, where Skye emigrant communities settled from the 1840s. The most prominent recent bearer of the name is Harold Nicolson, the British diplomat and author, though his family was of Anglo-Irish rather than Hebridean origin.

Researching Nicolson Ancestry

Nicolson genealogy requires attention to both the Scottish Gaelic records and the Ulster and North American emigrant documents. ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk covers the Skye parishes in its Old Parish Registers, though coverage before the mid-eighteenth century is sparse for Gaelic-speaking areas. The Highland Archive Centre in Inverness holds the records of the Church of Scotland's Inverness presbytery, which had oversight of many Skye parishes.

For Cape Breton branches, the Beaton Institute at Cape Breton University maintains extensive records of Skye emigrant communities. The Gaelic College of Celtic Arts and Crafts at St Ann's, Cape Breton, holds oral history recordings in Scottish Gaelic that document family names and migration histories.