In exploring the life of Alexander Stewart, I found more about his work than I had expected and the historical background in Scotland and Canada is available. But finding out about his parentage and ancestry turned out to be a more convoluted process than my husband and I had counted on.

Our first source was right at hand: The Stewarts of Dwight, written in about 1960-62 by Dave's Uncle Harold, Harold S. Stewart, a grandson of Alexander Stewart. In its genealogical section, Uncle Harold described how he obtained Mortlach parish birth and marriage records from Scotland and concluded that Alexander Stewart was the same person as the William Stewart (junior) born on 19 November 1813 to William Stewart (senior) of Nether Cluny, Mortlach parish, Banffshire, and his wife Elizabeth Grant. Uncle Harold identified this William Stewart (junior) as his grandfather Alexander Stewart because: the birth year (though not the month), the father's name (though not the baby's name), and the parish name agreed with family tradition; and this was the only son recorded to a William Stewart in that year and parish. Uncle Harold guessed that the baby had been named "William Alexander" but that "Alexander" had been omitted from the parish register. This identification led Uncle Harold to identify, in turn, William Stewart (senior)'s parents, James Stewart and Elizabeth Sutor, and the generation before them.

Dave then asked himself, could he go back any further? He joined the Stewart Society, a British organization devoted to the history of that "family", and the Society supplied him with a great deal of historical information. Among the materials was the report by Lieut. Col. Francis Robert Cameron Stewart of his ancestry, accepted in 1982 by Scotland's Lord Lyon King of Arms as documentation in F. R. C. Stewart's application for a coat of arms. To Dave's delight, he found that the ancestry that Uncle Harold had found for his grandfather tied in with F. R. C. Stewart's ancestry. This pushed knowledge of Dave's ancestry back into the 1500s. Dave then prepared a chart incorporating all that information and sent it out to the family in 1985, revised in 1986.

In 1989 I made a long-wished-for trip to Britain to visit some of the places Dave's and my ancestors came from, chief among them Mortlach parish. I stayed in its one village, the burgh of Dufftown, built during the years Alexander Stewart lived in the parish, and made a wonderful visit to Nether Cluny. Perhaps the vivid impression made on me by Alexander's glens and mountains was an influence in making me decide to push on to try to find out more about him.

Among the queries that I sent out to libraries, organizations, and individuals, was one to the Canadian Baptist Archives. They sent me a number of valuable items of information, including the name of another relative who had enquired about Alexander Stewart. She had asked that any other researcher about him write to her. I did. She was Helen Poole, the wife of a descendant of Alexander's half-brother William Stewart. Helen Poole made an important discovery: Elizabeth Grant's husband William Stewart was born in 1782, while Alexander's father William Stewart had married his first wife in 1793. Therefore, it was almost impossible for them to have been the same William Stewart! This, then, also eliminated Elizabeth Grant as Alexander's mother -- and eliminated more than 200 years of ancestors. It also meant that we no longer had to assume that Alexander's first name was actually William.

So, who was Alexander's mother? and who were his ancestors? The writings of Uncle Harold and of his father, Alexander's son, gave no further clues. Dave and I then decided to see whether we could find any clues in the papers of another of Alexander Stewart's grandsons, his namesake Alexander McGinn Stewart, Uncle Alec. He had written an article about his grandfather in 1947 but that gave no direct leads.

However, we did find handwritten notes naming several of Alexander's family, including his paternal grandfather, Peter (not James) Stewart, and giving some dates.

Then off to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' Family History Center in my county -- where I found Alexander's father, paternal grandparents, half-siblings, and some uncles in the microfiched International Genealogical Index. There was no entry for Alexander's christening (which is what the IGI usually records, rather than actual birthdates), so we couldn't confirm the family tradition of 1813 as his birth year and a friend's statement in an obituary that the month was May. Also, the IGI reports only parish names, not hamlets or villages within the parishes, so we didn't have place names for the family. And, with no christening record, there was no record of Alexander's mother's name.

At last we found it, in a record some 59 years later than his birth.

We knew (from two scant, cryptic references by Alexander's daughter-in-law and by Uncle Alec) that there was a second wife, but we had no name or marriage date and place. I finally tracked down the record of that marriage. Unlike the brief record of his first marriage, this one gave the names of the couple's parents. Alexander's mother was Ann McDonald.

I continued to collect interesting information of various kinds from everything from gravestones to censuses. I went back to the IGI but could find no record of the marriage of "our" William Stewart and Ann McDonald. Several considerate people answered my queries, only to find no connection. The wives of other collateral descendants wrote and sent material. Dave and I made brief visits to the Durham area, where Alexander and his family had lived; to Simcoe and Norfolk County, where he and both wives had lived; and to the Six Nations Reserve, where he had lived and worked. But still three questions remained:

Could we push Alexander Stewart's ancestry back before his grandparents?

Could we find his parents' marriage date and confirm his own birthdate?

Could we find where in Mortlach parish he was born and grew up?

I had gone as far as I could myself, so I turned to an organization recommended in genealogical books, the Scots Ancestry Research Society, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the same organization from which Uncle Harold had obtained parish records some 30 years earlier. At last I received the report of the Society -- but the researcher had been able to find no record of the birth of Alexander or the marriage of his parents. Deaths were not recorded by the parish, and Alexander's father had left no will. The Society was able to add a few place names to the information I already had; that was all.

Alexander's father's first marriage had been recorded, as had the baptisms of most of his half-siblings. Why had the baptism of his last half-brother in about 1811, the marriage of his parents, and his own birth or baptism in 1813 not been recorded?

At that time in history, the late 1700s and early 1800s, such records were not made by the government of Britain nor required of the people. Churches did record births and marriages, but only if the parties requested it -- and paid for it. According to family tradition, Alexander's father had become impoverished. It may well be that, when sons William junior and Alexander were born, he did not have the cash to pay for baptisms and registry in the official Church of Scotland in Mortlach parish. I also wondered why William senior's second marriage had not been recorded, though his first one had been. Perhaps the second one was a common-law, rather than a church, marriage. Another possibility is that Alexander's father had left the Church of Scotland or married a member of another church.

I then turned to another researcher. Mrs. Diane Baptie, a researcher in Edinburgh, had written articles about other types of documents than parish registers, had seen my enquiry in the Aberdeen and North-east Family History Society's journal, and had offered to see what she could find on Alexander Stewart. She checked the list of people who had to pay a tax in 1798 on farm horses, the Mortlach parish register and the records of the kirk business sessions, and obtained parish censuses of 1805 and 1821 from a Mr. McGregor of Elgin. She found Alexander and his parental family -- but also some new puzzles.

In the 1805 parish census William Stewart was listed with his wife, Elspet McConnachie, and their children. But -- the minister who took the census had at some time added the comment after William's name: "Another W.". Mr. McGregor suggested that this meant "Another Wife". Ann McDonald? When was the marriage?

In the 1821 census the minister did not list William Stewart himself (perhaps because he was away in the hills with the sheep) but he did list "William Stewart's wife" -- without naming her. She had living with her two of Elspet McConnachie's sons, and Ann McDonald's son.

Which wife was she, Elspet or Ann?

Elspet came from a numerous family, long established in the parish, she had been married by the church and had had seven children baptized by the church. It seems likely that the minister would have known her name in 1821 as he (or his predecessor) had in 1805, if she was still alive. It seems likely that she died at or soon after her last child's birth (perhaps explaining why she had not had him baptized like the others), and that her widowed husband then married Ann McDonald.

The fact that the minister did not know her name suggests that she may have been one of the small minority of the population of the parish who belonged to another church. The family of John McDonald and Isobel Gordon, married on 2 November 1794 in Aberlour parish, lived in Clunybeg in Mortlach parish, according to the 1805 parish census. The minister had noted that they were Roman Catholics. Ann may have been their daughter, though she was not listed in that census at a time when she would still have been a child, if born after 1794. So this led to a dead end.

Another puzzle: a marriage between an Ann McDonald and a William Stewart was registered in 1802 in Kirkmichael parish in the mountains southwest of Mortlach and again registered the next year in Mortlach parish although the husband was recorded as being from Abernethy, another neighboring mountain parish. "Our" William had already been married to Elspet since 1793. Could he possibly have succeeded in registering a bigamous marriage? Or did the principals coincidentally have the same names as Alexander's parents? There were enough William Stewarts in the area to make that plausible and enough Ann McDonalds to be possible.

The very incomplete surviving kirk session records for the period contain no record of fines or other disciplinary action concerning an irregular marriage of William Stewart and Ann McDonald so the Kirkmichael marriage seems to be another dead end.

I have been quite unable to find a plausible record for either Alexander's parents' marriage or his birth and, unless more records come to light, we will probably never know exactly what happened. So I have concluded that this genealogical detective story has no solution, only an ending. That part of Alexander's identity that came from his ancestry, parents, and community we can know only incompletely. We know his identity primarily as a Baptist minister, a pastor to the pioneers and Native Canadians of his adopted country.