Welcome to Clan Kerr/Carr,
one of the most famous clans along Scotland’s southern border with England
The word clan has evolved from the Gaelic term Clanna … meaning children. There are several hundred recognized clans in Scotland today. However because of English law, clans can only exist officially if they have a clan chieftain who has been officially vetted and recognized by the Lord Lyon of England.
There are two types of leaders. The “Clan Chief” is recognized as the head of a clan, represents the clan community at large. Recognition of the Clan Chief is in a line of succession, normally flowing through the male side of the family. Another leadership role in a clan is that of the “Clan Chieftain” who, before the 2nd Jacobite Rising, represented the Clan Chief by serving as the proprietor on clan lands and may or may not be in line of clan succession. Tradition serves that Clan Chieftains have a strong loyalty bond to the Chief and thus are related or bear an ancestral relationship to the Clan Chief.
Volumes of books and periodicals are available along with extensive background histories about Scottish Clan history on the internet. Interested clan members are encouraged to research these areas. Today most Americans of Scottish descent recall their heritage in a romantic association with men struggling for freedom and human rights against English oppression in the New World. The reality is different for most Scottish clansmen who arrived on America’s shores in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Truth be told, Scotland’s clan system began collapsing during the Jacobite Uprising which began in 1689. It lasted for the first half of the next century. Clan chieftains and their lackeys had long since forgotten their leadership and social responsibilities for those under their protection. The Jacobite Uprising involved England, Scotland, Ireland, Austria, Hanover/Prussia and France. By the time the Uprising was extinguished with the Scottish defeat at the Battle of Culloden Moor on 16 April, 1746, English conduct in suppressing the highland culture in Scotland is best described as “ethnic cleansing.”
Shortly after the crushing of the Uprising, the English monarchy imposed the most extreme terms on Scotland. Mass emigration of both lowland and highland Scots was followed by wholesale indiscriminate evictions of residents from their property. Known at the time as “The Clearances,” Clan leaders and wealthy Scots immensely enriched themselves by establishing new settlements in Georgia, the Carolina’s, New York, New England and Pennsylvania, and suggesting their people being evicted go there. Tens of thousands their dispossessed subjects, now penniless refugees fled to coasts. They departed in three huge waves, each involving many tens of thousands who arrived on America’s shores where they were used as indentured servants and cheap labor on colonial plantations.
By the end of the 19th century most of Britain’s anti-clan legislation had been repealed and Scotland’s people began to move past their troubled history. Britain’s socialist tax legislation that evolved during the 20th gradually also leveled the distinctions between the landed gentry and those without. Today in Scotland the clan memories are still alive but without the overburden of anger against the privileged gentries entitled for so long by the Divine Right of Kings.