Comments on: Meet The Chalmers: Lady Isabella Bird finds Scottish Covenanters in the 1873 Colorado Territory

By: A Victorian View Into Scottish North America: Part Two Of Lady Isabella Bird's Encounters With Scots In Canada And America | ScotClans | Scottish Clans

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 01:52:36 +0000

[…] A few weeks ago, we took a peek into the late nineteenth-century world of frontier Colorado with a m…. On one of her many adventurous journeys around the globe, Englishwoman Lady Isabella introduced us to the Chalmers family in the foothills of the front range in territorial Colorado and it was a revealing encounter. […]

By: Susan McIntosh

Susan McIntosh — Sun, 27 Dec 2015 18:10:07 +0000

Fascinating story Thor. Scotland has seen its share of persecution. Persecution of Covenanters seems to have left a particularly stubborn mark. Did your family ultimately leave Ireland?

By: Thor Ewing

Thor Ewing — Sun, 27 Dec 2015 16:06:11 +0000

My great grandmother Susan Chalmers (b.1860, Killough, C. Down) told my father how the family took boats from Scotland in the seventeenth century, where they had lived as “black mouthed Presbyterians.” It was only much later that we found out what this phrase meant; that because of their refusal to accept the English Prayer Book, our ancestors were forced to live in the wilds to avoid the persecutions of the Killing Times, their mouths stained by the berries they ate.

By: Susan McIntosh

Susan McIntosh — Thu, 24 Dec 2015 18:15:26 +0000

Thank you so much for that beta Mark! I had been thinking what a fascinating exercise it might be to trace the genealogy of this Chalmers family both forward and backward. It is not all that often that we find insights into a Chalmers – like family, albeit insight from a very specifically conditioned and biased source. It is nice to get a glimpse of life for early members of the Scottish diaspora who are not privileged enough to write down and preserve their own story.

By: Mark Jardine

Mark Jardine — Tue, 22 Dec 2015 12:39:32 +0000

Hi, the Chalmers family in the wilderness seem to adhere to the Cameronan brand of Presbyterianism that came directly from the Covenanters. If Mr Chalmer’s forebears were Covenanters and had the same surname, there several of that surname recorded in the 1680s.

‘James Chalmers, in Lanark’ appears on the published fugitive roll of May, 1684, of rebels who were still sought for their part in the battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679. (Wodrow, History, IV, 16.)
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aJYoAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA16#v=onepage&q&f=false

Another one who appears in the same roll is ‘Mary Chalmers, liferentrx in Clairbrand’ in Crossmichael parish, Galloway. (Wodrow, History, IV, 23.) She was probably listed for the reset of rebels and may/or may not, possibly be the widowed mother of two martyrs, William Graham (d.1682) and James Graham (d.1684).
https://drmarkjardine.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/who-shot-william-graham-claverhouse-the-killing-times-and-crossmichael-parish/