And now for a little fun...and history



McLarty coat of arms

 As an addendum to the history of my Presbyterianism from the previous two days:

I recently joined Ancestry.com and have learned lots of fun things about my ancestry.  I won't go into all of it here, but one thing that was delightful to learn was that I have Scottish forebears on my maternal grandmother's side.  My great-grandmother was a McLarty!  

Ever since seeing marching bagpipes in sixth grade, I have wanted to be Scottish.  Askew, by the way, is English.  When I finally began researching my English ancestry, I learned that the Askews are from Yorkshire, in Northern England.  I took some solace in the fact the ancestral village, Aiskew, is near the Scottish border, anyway.

The emblem of the Church of Scotland:
St; Andrew's Cross
and the Burning Bush of Moses

I thought I might be in luck when, in college, I found out that my paternal grandmother was a McSwain.  But I was immediately informed that she was Irish (I had assumed that any name that started with "Mc" had to be Scottish).  I have since learned that both the McLarty line and the McSwain line are part of that great migration to the Carolinas in the early nineteenth century known as the "Scotch-Irish."  They seem to be Scots folk who had immigrated to Ireland a generation or two before making it to the new world.

Anyway, it is both an irony and a joy to me that I have "come home" to the Church of Scotland, which is the indisputable source of all American Presbyterians.  And in respect to my English forebears, I love the Book of Common Prayer.  And in light of the fact that I am now "Reformed enough" to sign the membership requirements for those Dutch Reformed schools I mentioned in yesterday's blog, I should mention that my maternal grandfather was a Kuykendall.  Although the Kuykendall's are clearly Dutch, the family line from which my mom is descended had already been Baptists for several generations when she was born.