Andrew J. Ross provides the background to his new book on the life of his relative Donald Ross, a critic of the highland clearances who raised money and provided supplies for sufferers of the potato famine, but ultimately became a victim of his own success and emigrated to Canada following fraudulent fund-raising

Donald Ross was the most outspoken critic of the highland clearances in the 1850s. His most famous publication was The Massacre of the Rosses, which described the women of Greenyards in Ross and Cromarty being brutally beaten by policemen for refusing to accept eviction notices. This pamphlet was reprinted three times. Over the years, historians have commented that very little is known about Donald: noone was sure where was born, though it has been suggested that he may have come from Dornoch in Sutherland.

In 2004 I started investigating my family history, which became easier when I moved to Scotland in 2008 to take up a job as Principal Curator of Invertebrate Palaeobiology at National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh. I was now in close proximity to the National Records of Scotland (NRS) and National Library of Scotland (NLS) and every few months took a day off to peruse their records and books. I worked out that I was descended from another Donald Ross (1764?-1838), who was the miller on the Skibo Castle estate in Sutherland and lived at Clashmore, three miles west of Dornoch. This Donald had ten children and his seventh, also named Donald Ross, took over the running of Clashmore mill when his father died, assisted by his brother John Ross, millwright (my 3x great-grandfather). Donald married May Bayne from Perthshire in 1839. She was sixteen years older than Donald and fortunately for identification purposes, had kept her maiden name, which was a godsend for finding the family in the census records given that Donald Ross is a common name in the highlands. After the 1841 census they seemed to disappear until a hint on the Ancestry website showed them living in Glasgow in 1851 where Donald worked as a ‘writer’ (lawyer). The Glasgow post office directories provided further clues, showing where he had lived and worked.