William McAdie

William McAdie was a crofter in South Dunn and Lanergill in Watten Parish in the bleak moorlands of Caithness.  The famous Roy Map, created after Culloden to allow the British Army to find its way around the previously unmapped territory in the north, shows dotted lines representing cultivation.  It doesn't indicate how productive the land was or what it was used for but it's predominantly grass now, for cattle or sheep, sheep being significant in the Clearances which changed this area forever.  If you are interested in the Roy Maps, read here and here.  A careful look at this map and use of the slider shows the difference in quality between the land of The Crofts of South Dunn and the neat network of fields of the farm of South Dunn which would have been owned by a different class of person, the gentleman farmer.  The crofters got the poor land.  It is interesting though to read the Old Statistical Account which shows that in the late 1700s this was a grain area!  This was before "the sheep".  It does stress the difference though between the rich and poor farmers.  Their crofts are described here.

 

William was also listed as a loom weaver in one of the censuses but it can be assumed that he was both occupations at the same time, trying to eke out a living in desparate times.  Of course you need sheep to get the wool to weave.

The name McAdie is also Macadie and Mackadie and is a name from that part of the country as this graph from Ancestry shows (click on Scotland).

Interestingly, if you use the interactivity of that site you can see how the spelling of the name changed from Mcadie in 1841 to Macadie in 1851 but back again after that.  Basically it depended on the enumerators of the census.  One branch of the McAdies emigrated and as a result there is a crater on the moon named McAdie!

Talking of enumerators, some were so bad at writing that transcription errors have occured and caused problems in the indexes.  In the 1851 census I couldn't read the name of one of the sons.  It turned out from other sources that he was Diana.  This enumerator didn't even get the gender right.