McKAY & ŠUGŽDA

McKAY Overview

Our McKay lineage can only trace back to the early 1800s, and the earliest reference is to Aberdeenshire. Our patriarch, John [1] McKay, had moved to North Lanarkshire by the 1830s, where the family record really begins. His move to Cumnock, Ayrshire, by the 1860s brought us into contact with the McMeekin and Brown families, but his grandchildren later moved to places like Bellshill (twice), Kilwinning, Galston (twice), and Airdrie. These places were all mining villages, and that was the main occupation of our McKay menfolk for 100 years. To tell the history of my McKay ancestors, we have spread their stories over five separate pages, with two additional supporting stories:

1: Riggend & Airdrie, Lanarkshire: 1830–1878 (family of John [1] McKay & Mary Kilpatrick)

2 a: Wigtownshire: 1811–1841 (John [2] McMeekan & Mary McCreddie — Penninghame)

          b: Flynn–Connell: 1841–1861 (Peter Flynn & Elizabeth Connell — Garlieston & Sorbie)

          c: McMeekin-Flynn: 1835–1851 (John [3] McMeekin & Helen Flynn — Newton Stewart)

3 a: Town of Cumnock: 1861–1880 (John [3] McMeekin & Helen Flynn — Old Cumnock)

          b: McKay-McMeekin: 1863–1909 (John [2] McKay & Elizabeth McMeekin — Cumnock & Airdrie)

          c: Brown-McCulloch: 1864–1916 (Thomas [2] Brown & Mary McCulloch — Ayrshire)

            + Glengyron Row (by Kay McMeekin — history of one miner’s “raw”)

4: McKay Family Diaspora: 1889–1959 (children of Andrew McKay & Lizzie Brown)

            + Evans & Jenkins (“Buddy” McKay’s in-laws)

5: The “Andrew” Curse (a jinx or a coincidence?)

This chart graphically illustrates how the “McKay” stories are linked:

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ŠUGŽDA Overview

The story of our Šugžda ancestors is told over four main chapters. These stories follow the family from its homeland in Suvalki, Lithuania, to its new home in the mining villages of Bellshill and Bothwellhaugh in Lanarkshire:

1:  Lithuania: 1864–1902 (Lauckaimis & Vladislavov, Suvalki Governate)

2 a:  Scotland: 1903–1911 (Bellshill, Lanarkshire)

   b:  Bothwellhaugh: 1911–1922 (Lanarkshire)

   c:  The Years 1925–1943 (the family disperses)

3 a:  Šugžda Family Summary: The children of Jonas and Petronėlė

   b:  Our Lithuanian names: spelling, pronunciation and research

4:  Matilda Fletcher: The Zinkevičius/Šugžda story, by John Bissett

There are also several supporting articles to give the reader more information about Lithuanian heritage, language, and accounts of the Lithuanians in Scotland: 

• • “My Father Was a Smuggler” by John Miller (who was possibly related to us).
  • “The Lithuanians in Scotland — the when, how, why and what”  by John Miller.
  • “The Lithuanians”  by Murdoch Rodgers, 1985
  • “Lithuanians in Lanarkshire” by BBC Home, UK Local History to You.
  • “Lithuanian Miners in Scotland — migration & misconceptions”  by Prof. Marjory Harper.
  • “The Lithuanian Language – alphabet, pronunciation and surnames”  by Alan Craig.
  • “The Lithuanians”  by  ‘The Warrior’  (history, ethnicity and genetics).
  • “History of Bellshill”  by Dr. Gilbert T. Bell (addendum to the Map of Bellshill).
  • “Abandoned Communities — Bothwellhaugh”  by Robert Fisk.
  • “The Alex Grant Papers”: (i) Phaestos Disc; (ii) Lemnos Stele  (linguistics hypothesis).

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RELEVANT MAPS

All family stories on this website are supported by a series of specific maps that are colour-coded to show where our ancestors lived, worked and died, and it is always useful to have copies of relevant charts and maps handy when reading the stories — that way you will always keep track of individuals as you explore what we know of their lives. Each article contains links to the relevant maps for that page, but I have listed them here for convenience.

Maps for the McKay-McMeekin family (maps open in a new browser window):

• • Ayrshire North & East (including parts of East Ayrshire)
    • Galston (detail map of town)
  • Ayrshire South & East (county-wide map)
    • Old Cumnock Parish (district map)
    • Cumnock (detail map of town)
  • England & Wales (Evans family and some McMeekin)
  • Glasgow City (relative street locations & census districts)
    • Govanhill & Polmadie (detail map)
  • Lanarkshire North (northern districts with parish borders)
    • Bellshill (Town and surrounds)
  • Wigtownshire (county map with parish borders)
  • McKay Migration (Scotland & Ireland)
    • Migration to Australia (all family branches)
    • Migration to USA (all family branches)

Maps for the Šugžda Family (maps open in new browser tabs):

• • Lithuania: 1914 & 1990 (national maps)
  • Vilkaviškis District (NW part of old Suvalki)
  • North Lanarkshire (district map)
  • Bellshill (detail map of town)
  • Bothwellhaugh (detail map of village)
  • Šugžda migration to Scotland (McKay/Šugžda in Scotland)
  • Šugžda & Zinkevičius (Fletcher) (migration to USA)
  • New Jersey, USA (district map of Union and Hudson Counties)
  • Bayonne City, New Jersey (detail map of city)

Finally, it’s worth noting that throughout this website, all of my direct ancestors, whenever their names are mentioned, are marked in purple (to help the reader keep a focus on who’s who). Any blue text [mostly inside brackets like this] represents additional information or corrections, and did not form part of any of the original documents we have produced facsimiles of. Copies of the original birth, death, marriage and census records are held by me and stored in the Cloud, and can be made available to interested parties. When reproducing old parish baptismal and marriage entries, I have tried to keep the original archaic spellings and text, and also laid them out to reflect how they appeared in the parish records.

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Direct Ancestor Charts

The two charts below show all of my known direct ancestors on my maternal side. My grandfather, George Brown McKay,  was a descendant of four main family groups: McKay, McMeekin, Flynn and Brown. Though the McKay male line was  of Scottish ancestry, almost all the female lines were of Northern Irish descent, and mixed with a bit of Irish from my paternal side, it means that about a quarter of my ancestry is Irish — begorra! The parents I have for John [1] McKay at this point are still a bit speculative, but recent DNA matches have started to validate this branch. You can start reading about the McKay line at this link.
My grandmother was Petronėlė Juzė Šugždaitė, and her ancestry is purely Baltic. Up to about 1903, her family had lived in the Suvalki Governate of Lithuania, at that time part of the Tsar’s Russian Empire, and subsumed into Poland. Petronėlė was only about two when her family fled Lithuania and migrated to the mining town of Bellshill in Lanarkshire, Scotland. So, Baltic genes make up another quarter of my ancestry. The Šugžda story starts at this link.

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McKay Notes:

If you were to read the ‘official’ Clan MacKay histories, you would discover that the name originated in the far Gaelic-speaking north, which today is covered by Sutherland and Caithness, although they also had lands in Moray (Banffshire). The family motto is given as “Manu Forti”, meaning “with a strong hand”, and you would see that the clan turned out to support William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, but joined the government forces to oppose the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745. The MacKay clan has an attractive array of green-blue tartans, and the current chief of the clan is, you’ll be pleased to know, Æneas Simon MacKay, Master of Reay, Baron of Ophemert and Zennewijnen, Baronet of Strathnaven.

Does any of this relate to our branch of the McKay family? Probably not or, at best, not much. Yes, there is a vague possibility that we share kindred relationships with the hereditary chiefs of the MacKay Clan — but, for the most part, peasant stock simply began to ‘adopt’ the name of the local lords when fixed surnames began to evolve not much before the sixteenth century. In fact, in highland areas, adopting a fixed surname really didn’t gain any momentum until the late eighteenth century, and our actual ‘kinfolk’ were just as likely to assume names based on locality or occupation as they were to pick the local chief’s name.

An interesting feature of our McKay family is that three consecutive members in the male line married lassies of Northern Irish ancestry—which meant that my grandfather, George McKay, had a lineage that was only one-quarter Scottish, but three-quarters from Ulster. However, by the 1930s, most of our close relatives had left Scotland for the USA and Australia, and our Scottish connections became very sparse. Apart from three second cousins, my McKay relatives are now ‘New World’ families.

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Notes on Lithuania

Lithuania is a very small country, in the far-away northern Baltic region, with a population of less than three million and an area of just over 65,000 square kilometres (25,000 square miles). Its population is only marginally greater than Brisbane City and its landmass only two-thirds the size of tiny Scotland (see the map here). It may seem surprising, then, that in the mid-seventeenth century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in league with Poland, dominated a large part of central Europe, including parts of Russia and most of Belarus, Ukraine, Prussia, and the other Baltic states (Latvia and Estonia).

Lithuania’s days of glory, though, had waned by the late 1700s when it was annexed into the Tsar’s Russian Empire, and largely subsumed as part of Poland; even the language was eventually banned towards the end of the nineteenth century. The Russian Bolshevik revolution during the First World War eventually brought a spark of independence to Lithuania between 1920 and 1940, but this disappeared when the Soviets occupied the country under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbontrop Pact. However, in June 1941, Operation Barbarossa brought the Nazis and their Holocaust to further brutalise Lithuania (with some help from collaborators) until the nation was ‘liberated’ by the Red Army in July 1944 — this heralded in the Stalinist era with more oppression, deportations, ‘disappearances’, forced re-settlements, and further Russification. After the brutal murder of nearly 800,000 citizens between 1940 and 1954, Lithuania could do little but remain a Soviet satellite, one of the USSR’s ‘captive nations’, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. Today, Lithuania is, finally, a sovereign nation and part of the European Union and NATO.

From 1868 to 1914, about one in four Lithuanians (over 600,000) departed their homeland — the main exodus, which was mainly peasant stock, occurred between 1890 and 1910. The reasons for this mass emigration are not altogether clear, but drastically falling living standards, heavy taxation, and avoidance of conscription into the Tsar’s Russian army were primary motivations. The vast majority of these migrants went to the United States where there was an open-door immigration policy. Nevertheless, by the turn of the century, the Lithuanian community in Britain had burgeoned from a few hundred to over 9,000 — and, of these, more than 7,000 settled in Scotland. These newcomers were mainly Roman Catholic, but there were also Jewish refugees escaping Russian persecution; however, these two groups had little to do with each other in Scotland. It was into this milieu that, sometime around 1902–3, Jonas Šugžda and his wife Petronėlė, with two boys and three girls, joined the Lithuanian ‘colony’ centred around the North Lanarkshire mining towns of Bellshill, Bothwell, Bothwellhaugh, Coatbridge and Mossend.

Šugžda Photo Gallery