Triple Great Grandfather

This is the furthest back in my family tree that I have reached.
My Great, Great, great grandfather Allan McCaskill.
Since I now knew his name and his wife's name Ellen, I had something to search.
This first Census only took a couple hours to find.
1861Canada Census that indicates Allen was born in Scotland, it indicated he was married to Ellen she was               born in Scotland as well.
It lists John, Margaret and Archibald were also born in Scotland but Margaret was born in Canada.
That means they came to Canada in the early 1850's.

That was very cool, I finially found the link back to Scotland.
It was also interesting that they were listed as Roman Catholic.  Most of theother records of McCaskill's were protestants.

Allan was born in 1817.
Mary was born in 1822.

I then looked for the 1871 Census to see if I could find that one.  This one took longer but I found it.  But surprisingly it indicated that Mary was a Widow. I met that Allen had died sometime in the last 10 years.
The 2 Canadian Census also indicated that they were from the Ingersol District in Scotland

I then wanted to find more information about them in Scotland.
I tried to find the ship in which they came to Canada on, but Canadian law didn't make the Captains keep a manifest until 1865, so there aren't that many records.  I searched the web for hours and found some, but no reference to our McCaskill's .

So, then I tried searching some of hte Scottish Records butit required to pay to searchthe records so I look around on the internet for some free searches....this took hours and got me no where...so after thinking about it for a couple of days I decided to pay the $30.

It was worth the money I was able to find some record of them in Scotland.
The first one was the 1851 Scottish Census that had the entire Family( minus Catherine, because she was born in Candada) listed. Alan was 30, Mary 35, John 9, Mary 7,Marget 4 and Archibald 10.  the ages were a little off that is quite normal they didn't seem to know how old they really were.

The interesting thing is the spelling of the last name...As I found out later it appears that my Great, Great, Great grandfather changed our last name when he came over from Scotland. His last name was Macaskill.  This was proven out in future records that I found.
At first I was thinking that maybe this was someone different but after a couple days of research it was obvious that they were the same person.

A couple more interesting points from this Census was that that it included their address:South Uist, Invishire. Again the Invishire matched just more info with South Uist.   Here is map of South Uist in Scotland. Beautiful place.


http://maps.google.ca/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=South+Uist,+scotland&aq=&sll=49.891235,-97.15369&sspn=38.495679,93.076172&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=South+Uist&ll=57.277558,-6.833496&spn=1.003689,2.90863&z=9

Another interesting thing was that he was a Moss Crofter.  Best I could find it met he was a Farmer.
More to come on this post when I have time to finish it.
Don McCaskell...or McCaskill...or Macaskill...:-)