(Jan. 1850-21 July 1921), lawyer, town clerk, author. Leaving Scotland on 19 Aug. 1882, he made a two-month tour of Canada and the United States. His description of the tour, called “A Run through Canada and the States,” was published in The Celtic Magazine (Inverness, Scotland) of Alexander Mackenzie, who had published in the same journal his account of his own similar trip of 1879. Resembling in structure and emphasis Mackenzie’s account, we may assume that Macdonald’s was based on that earlier work. Like Mackenzie, Macdonald visited GC during the tour and left a valuable and interesting description of what he found there. He notes the state of the roads, and the purchase of GC farms by French Canadians, and discusses the quality of GC farming, and touches on the movement in progress by that time of farm people from Ontario, including GC, to Manitoba.
In his description of his departure from the county, he gives a glimpse of the Glengarrians of that time, and of himself. For at Lancaster, while waiting for the westbound train, he had “Time enough fortunately to see and make the acquaintance of a few more Highlanders–two of them Macdonalds–uncle and nephew, both genuine Celts, who would persist in addressing me in Gaelic, and could not be got to understand how it was that a native of Inverness, and a friend of the Editor [Alexander Mackenzie] of the Celtic Magazine, did not know his native language. I deplored the shortsightedness of those responsible for my upbringing in neglecting so important a branch of my education; reminded them that in my youth Gaelic was not so fashionable an acquirement, as, thanks very much to my friend Professor Blackie, it has since become; and then, having drowned all discord in a drop of old rye, I left my new-found friends with a qualified promise to take the earliest opportunity of remedying the defect in my education.”
Kenneth Macdonald was a native of Inverness, Scotland. He qualified as a lawyer, obtaining part of his legal training at the University of Glasgow. He was town clerk of Inverness for 40 years, being appointed in 1881. He also practised law in Inverness from the early 1870s till his death. He was an authority and writer on the history of Inverness and the Highlands, and was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. His obituary notices that he was a friend and defender of the crofters. He was the editor of the 2nd edition of a Scottish work which has a few GC references, Charles Fraser-Mackintosh’s Antiquarian Notes (1913).
For Kenneth Macdonald, see also the entries for Donald (later Sir Donald) MacMaster, and Evander McRae.
Information kindly supplied by Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and the Inverness Library; the latter has supplied copies of the printed minutes of a special meeting of the town Council, Inverness, regretting Macdonald’s death, and the death notice & long, fine, detailed obituary (which has unhappily no mention of the 1882 trip) from The Inverness Courier * his 13-part narrative of his tour, The Celtic Magazine, VIII (1883) and IX (1884), with the GC passages VIII pp. 110-117, 229-230, IX p. 224 * Bibliography of Glengarry 15