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Finding lost connections: Thomas F. Scott

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On Easter Sunday, 2000 the connection between two Scott family branches from Forfar, Scotland was rediscovered in Ste. Croix, Nova Scotia.  Amid the  excitement of a five year old discovering Easter eggs, were my sisters and cousins who had gathered to be with our uncle/father Fred Scott, when a picture and a clipping cemented a tentative connection that had started to emerge weeks before through the Internet.

The life of Thomas F. Scott a prominent 19th Century, American Methodist layman was documented in church newspapers and when he died in 1910 his obituary was published both by local papers and a national Methodist publication.  Because of his Canadian connections, eventually it was republished by a newspaper in Nova Scotia where his Scottish grandparents had lived 110 years before.  The local article and national obituary matched a similar document sent to descendants of the Nova Scotia family by Donna Maloy a descendant of Thomas F. Scott who had been researching her Scott ancestors through Scott Family Genealogy Forum at GenForum on the Internet.  Her posting on Feb. 7, 2000 matched an item I posted on Nov. 11, 1999.  While we had the same family names and dates, there was no solid documentation to connect the two families since the families had been out of touch for 90 years.

Similarities including the birth of Thomas F. Scott's sister Margaret in 1825, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the home town of Thomas's widowed grandmother Jean (Dalgity) Scott and Margaret's baptism in the family church in Halifax on December 26, 1826.

Underlying the facts for both families was a legend of a kinship connection to Sir Walter Scott and this connection which remains undocumented had led both families to research the connection further.  The Nova Scotia family began in 1936 when my father, Rev. Jack Scott began documenting a possible connection through the brother of Sir Walter Scott also called Thomas who along with his wife came to Canada as a Paymaster with the British Army and eventually died in Canada.  Military documentation and historical research discounted that particular connection to Sir Walter but the exercise was productive in other ways as family history materials he retained the 1940's and 1950's while doing his research survived. The individuals he wrote were in their late 80's and 90's and provided a permanent written record about the family in North America which could have been lost. Oral history became a written record and this was saved after his death in 1958 became the starting point for my research in 1973, continuing where he left off.  Searching further in military records led to documentation of the original emigrants from Scotland, Sergeant David Scott and Jean Dalgity who were married in 1795 and came to Halifax with the Royal Artillery in 1801 with their young sons.

The search for Thomas Scott a grandson of these Scottish pioneers had continued without much in results. A distant dream of finding relatives seemed daunting. Little did Iknow that Donna Maloy had taken up the same search in 1983 after being given a 1910 obituary and picture of her ancestor Thomas F. Scott of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which indicated an ancestral connection to Sir Walter Scott. After a move from State College (home of Pennsylvania State University) to Virginia with her husband Dr. Roy Maloy, an Electrical Engineer, she was further away from Pittsburgh archival sources so started documenting her Scottish connections using the Internet. I had likewise begun searching in similar areas on the Internet and thus a first tentative connection was made in February 2000.  On Easter morning we discovered the confirming connection as each side of the family had the same obituaries saved in family records. A Nova Scotia obituary indicated the local connections and linked two original branches of a Scottish family that have been in North America for nine generations.  It also provides a link to Forfar in the Southern Highlands of Scotland for individuals who did not known their exact area of ancestry.

Donna Maloy through her own research, had located several branches of her line including tracking living descendants and relatives of the three original Pittsburgh families, restoring contact among these various families. 

During the mid 1800's poor mail service or possibly incorrect addresses meant that letters were not delivered and this caused the families to lose touch. Boston relatives seeing a newspaper article that mentioned once familiar names led to a reuniting of the two families and the elderly brothers who had arrived in Nova Scotia as toddlers 60 years before were able to meet again in the 1860's. The younger generation at that time were then in their mid-forties and began communicating. Thomas F. Scott, from Pittsburgh stayed with his Boston relatives in 1870 which is recorded in a letter from the Boston family to their Nova Scotia cousins. When Thomas F. Scott died his obituary was conveyed to Nova Scotia but after that communication between some of the family lines which then numbered nine families was lost again.

It is exciting that many years after the arrival of the family in North America, descendants of the two Scott brothers and their wives who founded the main branches of the family, are now able to communicate through an methods that would have amazed their ancestors.

It is a real tribute to individuals who retold family stories, wrote names on the back of pictures, saved newspaper clippings, and wrote letters that we tell the story of generations that have gone before.

 A Family from Forfar is a step towards telling the story of the earliest generation and their descendants.

Additional material on Thomas Forester Scott is also available within HomePort including, transcriptions of obituaries published after his death, and a brief biography.   The images used within the biography are also listed by source on a separate page.

Update 2019 --  DNA results for both Donna Maloy and myself indicate a DNA match and is another confirming piece of evidence showing a genetic connection between the two founding branches of the family. These two branches are called the Northern and Pittsburgh branches representing the families of the original brothers. During the generation of Thomas F. Scott, his siblings and first cousins established nine family lines.