RICHARD IV PACE - b 1699 Bladen Co NC d 1775
+ ELIZABETH CAIN m 1723
- RICHARD V PACE b 1734
+ SARAH DAY
- CHARLOTTE PACE 1763-1845
b 1763 possibly in Lowndes Co AL d 1845 Lowndes Co AL
+ LUDBROOK LEE b. c. 1763 possibly Edgefield District, SC
d. c. 1800 possibly Edgefield District, SC
- MARTIN LEE b. 23 May 1798 d. 09 March 1856
+ MARTHA DAY 1804-1875 b 20 Aug 1804 m 15 Jan 1824 d 12 Aug 1875
- EVAN LUDBROOK LEE b 16 Oct 1822 d 01 Jan 1900
+ NANCY McINTYRE
b 09 April 1824 d 31 Dec 1896
Pace-Lee-McIntyre researchers swore that Evan Ludbrook Lee's wife Nancy McIntyre (1824-1896)
was born in Scotland, even though Nancy McIntyre stated on every state and federal censuses that asked the question that she was born in Mississippi.
Their reasoning was that because Nancy Mcintyre spoke the Gaelic, she couldn't have been born in Mississippi
Apart from her affinity for languages (she also spoke Choctaw and English - or possibly Scots) not much was known about Nancy, who turned up in Mississippi at age six, living with, it was said, "an elderly relative".
You *think* that Nancy couldn't have been born in
Mississippi and learned the Gaelic there, but you
don't *know* that."
Gulp, I went.
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And thus began a two-year search to see if the
Gaelic had indeed been a language of everyday life
in early Mississippi.
I began to think about the great abundance of
Mc*** names I'd seen on Mississippi records.
(There are almost no spellings with Mac*** in
early Mississippi records, including censuses - my
guess is that where the person was illiterate, it
was early on deemed that the spelling would be
Mc.)
Then I found out that the time and place and the
patterns of Highland and Irish migration to the US
indicated that a preponderance of those Mc names
in Mississippi would be Highland, not Irish.
And so they were, for just as Highlanders poured
into the Carolinas in the last quarter of the
1700s, they poured out and into Mississippi, among
other places, in the early part of the 1800s.
Thus it turns out that when Nancy was coming up,
whole school districts in Mississippi worked in
the Gaelic, there were Gaelic-speaking churches
there, and so on.
It was only in the aftermath of the American Civil
War and the massive outpouring
of Mississippians into Indian Territory and Texas
and points beyond that the Gaelic lost its
critical mass and died as a language of everyday
life. Had there not been the war, the Gaelic might've lived on, as it has, in Nova Scotia.
Later, a McIntyre kinswoman in Mississippi found
court documents from the 1840s that confirmed
Nancy's birth in Mississippi and that confirmed
that the Gaelic was indeed her mother tongue,
learned - where else! - at home.
As Nancy would've put it, slàinte mhath,
PK
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