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Clan Sutherland Society in Scotland
Founded in 1897 and reconstituted in 1977, The Clan Sutherland Society in Scotland has members across the globe and endeavours to connect everyone of Sutherland descent and those who have a genuine interest in the Sutherlands, aiming to preserve the clan's places and objects, exchange advice and information and encourage research into the clan's history.
An Interview with Mark Sutherland-Fisher | President & Genealogist
We were delighted to chat to Mark Sutherland-Fisher from the Clan Sutherland Society in Scotland for an in-depth interview all about the Sutherlands for our Clan of the Month celebrations. Mark is the President and Genealogist for the Society, and has a wealth of knowledge, so grab your favorite drink and settle in for a fascinating read!
Thank you, Mark for joining us today. Have you celebrated your clan heritage from a young age?
I can't remember a time when I wasn't aware of being a Sutherland. It's a shame for my father's family, because my late father came from a very old English family. But I was brought up a Sutherland and I spent a great deal of time as a child with my maternal grandfather. And he was the one who probably instilled in me what it meant to be a Sutherland.
What does being a member of Clan Sutherland mean to you?
It quite literally comes down to the old DNA. So many of the clans, most of the “Mac” clans, for example, they are clans in the traditional sense that although they share a common surname, most of them don't share common ancestry because “Mac” just means “son of”.
But the Sutherlands are one of the Norman Flemish clans who originate in Scotland from the time of David I. And therefore, virtually everyone with the name of Sutherland in some way or another is related to virtually everyone else of the name of Sutherland. And it really takes the word “clan” to the family meaning, as opposed to just the wider meaning of people who live in the area of Sutherland.
I've always said there are four types of Sutherlands. There are those who are the direct descendants of Freskin, the founder of the Sutherland family.
There are those who are sort of in-laws. What was quite a common practice where a landowner in the family only had daughters, it became a condition for a son-in-law to take the name Sutherland instead of his own name to inherit his wife and her father's property.
The third group are those who basically served a branch of the Sutherland family for generations, so they took the name on as a sort of sign of loyalty.
And then the last group are the poor souls who just happened to live in what we now see as being Sutherland and who lived under the yoke of the Picts and then the Vikings. And then from the late 1100s, the Sutherland family.
But even most of that last group have blood ties because of the intermarriage down through the generations.
The other clans of Norman French or Flemish origins tend to be much the same because they sort of imposed, as opposed to have just having been there since time immemorial.
Do you have a favorite story or a fun fact to share about the history of the clan?
For all those out there who are Game of Thrones fans, I often say that Game of Thrones could have been based on the history of the Sutherland family.
I mean, we have to our name Regicide, Patricide, Matricide, Fratricide. You name it. Within the family, we've killed them. One of my favourite stories, when I am giving a talk at gatherings and events, I always talk about William Wallace and ask everybody to put up their hands who think William Wallace was a great hero and all the hands go straight up, of course.
And then I say, what about Sir John de Menteith, the man who captured William Wallace and surrendered him to Edward of England? Do you think he's a terrible traitor? And all the hands go up. And then I say, well, I hate to tell you, but most of you are descended from an absolute traitor. Because Sir John de Menteith, who was constable of Dumbarton Castle at the time, and captured William Wallace and then handed him over, was the father-in-law of William the 5th Earl of Sutherland. Well, actually, he was the second father-in-law. The first father-in-law was Robert the Bruce. But Princess Margaret Bruce died in childbirth, or just immediately afterwards, and only had one son, but it was her elder half-sister, who was Marjorie, whose son eventually became King of Scotland. But the second wife was the daughter of Sir John de Menteith. So almost all Sutherland bloodline are descended from Sir John de Menteith. He's my 22 times great grandfather.
So people sort of have very precise and definite views of Scottish history and take sides very quickly without realising it's very finessed.
I've always thought, and I've never discussed it with any serious historians, for example, Dr. Fiona Watson of Stirling University, who I would say is the absolute expert on William Wallace. I often wondered if the man behind the downfall of William Wallace was actually Robert the Bruce. He was the person that had most to gain from it. And Sir John de Menteith was related to Robert the Bruce.
Sir John de Menteith's father was a Stewart. He inherited de Menteith from his mother. So, late 13th century Scottish politics was very, very murky. There are so many stories about the family I can tell you. Murders and poisonings and goodness knows what. So I just always say Game of Thrones. That sums us up.
Which of the clan tartan variations do you wear and do you have a favorite?
I prefer and tend to wear the Sutherland Old. My late cousin Kenny Sutherland, about 30 odd years ago, commissioned the reweaving of several of the tartans that hadn't been popular in the family for centuries. We recognize 7 tartans and about half of them are old and come from vegetable dyes and the other half are more modern and come from the synthetic dyes.
And of course, you probably know the story that the whole modern clan system basically is an invention of Sir Walter Scott in 1822 for the state visit of George IV. And all these great nobles of Scotland went hurrying home from their London houses to their drafty castles and mansions all over Scotland, searched the attics and basements for portraits that had some sort of tartan in them to work out what they should be wearing. And many of these “ancient” tartans are no more than 200 years old.
We've got the odd portrait or two dating back to before the Jacobite era. And one of my favorite portraits is the one of Kenneth, 3rd Lord Duffus, who was the only major Jacobite in the family. And he has a sort of brownish tartan, the Sutherland of Duffus Tartan, which I don't have, but if I was going to have one made-up, I'd probably have that made. Because it'd be quite good as an alternative to the blues and the greens and reds.
How did you first get involved with the Clan Sutherland Society in Scotland?
I was born and grew up in Glasgow, but as an only child, during school holidays, I was farmed out around aunts and uncles, and so I spent a lot of time up in the Moray Firth with family in Nairn and Inverness to make up for the lack of siblings. When I left university, I came back to Inverness and stayed with an aunt and uncle at first while I was doing my apprenticeship. And that's when I got involved in the clan society just over 40 odd years ago. I’d just joined and then within 5 minutes I was on the council. That's kind of the story of my life. You take an interest in something and before you know it, you're on the ruling committee or you're President!
What does the role of President involve?
I'm not a figurehead because that's the clan chief, that's Alistair. My role is to run the clan. In the UK we have the Society in Scotland. We also have a separate standing Australian, Canadian and American societies, and then we have branches in Mainland Europe and New Zealand. My role is basically to bring them all together, keep them all in contact and foster interest in the history of our family and our clan. And I do that supported by a really good council who have members from all over the world.
What would you say is the most rewarding aspect of your role as president?
It merges into my role as genealogist. When somebody first contacts me because they think they're a Sutherland, or they know they're a Sutherland but don't really know what it involves, and I'm able to work out who they are and where they come from, and basically unroll their history for them.
Which in some cases can go the whole way back or introduce them to cousins they didn't know they had. And that's great fun.
When we have Gatherings every four or five years and people come from all around the world, it's great fun to introduce cousins to one another.
One of the strange things is when we have clan gatherings, firstly everyone there is a cousin of everyone else that's there. And DNA, of course, has now proved that.
Families have certain characteristics. In the Sutherlands, we have the same eyes and nose. And I always say to people, go round in Dunrobin Castle and play a little game in your mind. Imagine cutting the eyes and nose out of all the portraits and swapping them round and they still look the same.
You've just touched on being the genealogist for the clan. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Have you always had an interest in the subject?
I first got involved in genealogy, believe it or not, 50 years ago as a teenager. And again, it was the fault of my grandfather. My grandfather and his late brother had this irritating habit when you asked either of them how we were related to someone, they would always just say “a sort of cousin”. And I've often discussed this with my mother's cousin and we wonder if it was a defence mechanism because they were born before the First World War and their father died in 1918. And when their mother was widowed with six children, one of her brothers was fortunate enough to buy a house and he installed them all in it. And he also installed a couple of other nephews and nieces who were illegitimate. And of course, in that era, it was quite scandalous to be illegitimate. So we've often wondered if this was a defence mechanism my grandfather and my grand uncle effectively created to protect the identity of their cousins who grew up as brother and sister with them. So they didn't point out, he's illegitimate, she's illegitimate, with all the horrors that would then accompany them with that with the rest of life.
Granddad talked about the family history, not just the Sutherlands, all the other Highland families that he descends from, and therefore I descend from, and particularly some of the more famous members of the family who'd gone to other ends of the world and done fascinating and interesting things. Build the Canadian Pacific Railway, for example, funding it, not hammering in spikes, except the last one, which was a golden spike.
I always say to people, I've got lots of very grand cousins, but I always come from the poorest branch of each branch of the family!
So that's basically where my interest came from. And I also wondered, as I was in my teens, and because I didn't have siblings, what sort of person I would become. And I thought one way of maybe guessing that would be to see who the people were that I came from. And if I had ancestors with particular characteristics, would I grow to be like them?
I haven't yet discovered if I'm descended from Machiavelli, but I probably should be! So that's where it all came.
What would you advise someone interested in learning about their Sutherland ancestry to start with?
I always say start with yourself. Start with the bottom and you build your way up. You go back generation by generation. And if something doesn't look quite right, you should assume it isn't quite right. It's a bit like a purchase. If something's too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.
There are fantastic organisations like Family Search, which is run by the Mormons, and Ancestry, which of course everybody's heard about because it's always been advertised. But sadly, one of the downsides of the internet, there are too many people who see something which looks right and therefore assume it's right without questioning it. And I have literally seen thousands, and I mean thousands, of family trees on the internet, which are just rubbish.
There are maybe three or four different family trees tacked on to one another. Simply because most people don't understand that before the 1841 census, the vast majority of ordinary Scots simply did not appear in any records of any form.
The parish registers, which were the official records of the Church of Scotland, were there for two reasons: to determine whether children were legitimate or not and to determine whether couples were living in sin or not. And that's the only thing that interested the church.
But you had to pay to be registered because the money that came went to the registers for registration, that helped pay for the poor roll in the parish in the days before the social security. Ordinary working class folk usually couldn't afford to pay the sixpence or whatever it was that the minister extracted for registering a baptism.
Also a great many people didn't enter a regular marriage; they weren't married by the minister. Irregular marriage was legal in Scotland right up until the 1980s. If a couple were free to marry and announced to their family and friends that they were married and the family and friends accepted it, that was it. That was legally binding. They were married. No minister involved.
And of course, when people did get married with the church, they didn't get married in church. They tended to get married in one or other house.
People get stuck around about 1790 because registration in Scotland, compulsory registration, only began in 1855. And therefore, most people didn't live much beyond the age of 50. You tend to have people born around about 1780-1790, which is the earliest people can get to. If records exist, we endeavour to find them for people.
Can you tell us a bit about the European branch of your Society?
One of the things about the clan is you do get people who are not naturally descendants, but who become incredibly interested. Take, for example, our European branch. How it came about is fascinating.
So many young men, and to some extent young women, died in Belgium and France, particularly between 1914 and 1918, but also between 1939 and 1945. And the Belgians in particular are an amazing nation. They have all these huge Commonwealth and German Axis war cemeteries and graveyards all over the country. And there's an honourable tradition of Belgian folks adopting a grave and looking after it.
About seven years ago now, this chap from Belgium who is a firefighter and works at one of the airfields contacted me because he was interested in the graves of a couple of Sutherland lads who were buried side by side. He'd been investigating and it turned out they were stretcher bearers and they were busy withdrawing a wounded man when they were hit with a shell, which killed them all.
And he became really, really interested in Clan Sutherland. I said to him, after a couple of emails, you'd be very welcome to join the Clan Society if you're interested, because you've got a greater interest in the Clan than a great many people born with the name. And he took me up on the offer. Philippe became very involved and within a year our secretary and his wife, who was my predecessor as president, retired to the south of France. And they all got in touch because Clan Hay had set up an organisation called Clans’ Days in Belgium, which takes place the first weekend in October when they commemorate the fallen at the Menin Gate.
It started to grow and grow. And to cut a long story short, Philippe and Douglas and Linda asked me about forming a branch. I said, let's form a mainland European branch. So they gathered around them our members who are living in mainland Europe; people living in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Germany. Because of distance, they don't get a chance to meet very often, but lockdown brought us all into the world of Zoom, so they have quarterly meetings by Zoom. Which I’m invited to attend, and our Australian representative on our clan council, she also attends. Because there's been a connection with one of the deaths in Flanders.
Our European branch has been going for five years now, and they make a tremendous commemoration in October. One of our younger members, Francois, his great-great-grandmother had been in Belgium just before the start of the First World War. And when the war started, she had to leave the country, and left behind their baby son, who was brought up by his father's family. But he was brought up as a Sutherland.
His father's family were quite a prominent military family and that family of Sutherlands went on to become fairly prominent in Belgium.
In the days when we still had phone directories, and you looked at the phone directories for Belgium and the Netherlands, they were full of Sutherlands and indeed Highland Scottish names, because of the men who went out in the Scots Brigade in the 17th and 18th centuries to fight the French and never came back. They settled and started families. So there's a strong history of Highland Scots in particularly Belgium and what's now the Netherlands. And we've built our European branch around that.
That’s really fascinating.
Remember a few years ago, we had that magnificent installation at the Tower of London of the hundreds of thousands of ceramic poppies. And then they went on tour around the country before being auctioned off.
Well, a few years ago, the Belgians created 600,000 “pottery heads”, one for each fallen soldier who died in Belgium. And the two original Scots lads that Philippe became attached to, he then was in contact with Fort George, and through Fort George was able to contact living relatives of both young men.
In 2023, which was our last international clan gathering, Philippe and a number of the European branch members came over. We met up with the family of Daniel Sutherland, one of the two young men, in Wick, when we were out on our coach tour. And he presented the Belgian pottery head together with a certificate and a jar filled with soil from where Daniel had died to the family. It was presented to another Daniel Sutherland who was the grandnephew of the lad who'd died. And his wife, a well-known local artist, had hand-painted a beautiful poppy, which is now in Talbot House in Belgium, which was a rest home that soldiers went to when they came off the front line.
Unknown to me, he also presented me with one, because my great-grandfather died at Arras in May 1918. Just a couple of months ago, another great nephew of Private Daniel Sutherland and his wife went over to Belgium and Philippe and his wife took them to the place where Daniel died and also to the reproduction of the trenches’ site and various battle fields and then to the point where they're remembered their gravestones are. And so there's that ongoing connection.
Last year it was one of our American Sutherlands. She'd had a great uncle who died and she went over and was there for the October commemorations. The European branch has facilitated an ongoing connection to the families of some of the young men who died 100 years ago.
It's very special.
Finally, please tell us how clan members can get involved with Clan Sutherland Society in Scotland?
If anybody wants to get involved with the clan, we've got a website for our society in Scotland. The Australian and Americans both have their own websites as well. The Canadians are in the process of creating a new one.
We also have Facebook groups. There is a generic Facebook group which is “Clan Sutherland”, and anyone can join it if they're interested in the clan. They don't need to be members of any of the Societies. To join the Society Facebook groups, you have to be a member of the society.
Membership is open to anyone who has the name Sutherland, anyone who is descended from a Sutherland, anyone who has one of the associated surnames (septs, families that were associated with the Sutherlands), or just anyone who's genuinely interested in the history of the Sutherland clan.
Anything other good stories you’d like to add?
One of the things I've done in the last few years is take my predecessor, genealogist Daniel J.J. Sutherland who's almost 100 years old and still alive, who had started to put together a comprehensive family tree covering 30 generations of the family, which over the last 30 years, I've extended.
There's a very thorny subject which people prefer not to talk about. And that's the question of slavery. Far more important than the Highland Clearances. And it's not a coincidence that if you look at the names of the plantations in Jamaica, St Vincent, St Lucia, the other Caribbean islands, you'll find they're named after almost every village and town all around the Moray Firth from Wick to Elgin.
There's almost not a Highland family who didn't have some role in slavery and made a lot of money from it. And that included if an estate Laird had a tenant who had a son who was quite bright and had been educated by the parish minister or parish school, he might send him out to the West Indies to become basically a clerk or administrator. And many of those clerks or administrators became so rich themselves. Later in life they came back home to Scotland, bought an estate, and then you could find that their children or grandchildren married a child or grandchild of the Laird who'd originally sent them out. It was one of the ways in which families rose rapidly socially.
And the Highlands are steeped, unfortunately, in slavery. David Alston, the former councillor from the Black Isle, is the expert on the role of Scots in slavery, and he's written a fantastic book. But I have been putting together the origins of many of the mixed-race Sutherlands.
In the last 10 years, I've had about 7 or 8 mixed-race Sutherland cousins visit me who are all descended from a white male Sutherland and a black woman who was either a slave or had been freed. And they're all in the family tree now, too, because they're as much Sutherlands as I am. Their attitude is they don't think about the ghastly side of how it all came about. They just rejoice in the fact that they're Sutherlands.
And funnily enough, when you see them, if you ignore the colour of skin, they've all got the same eyes and nose. That genetic characteristic that came from Flanders is still there. I think it's hugely important. It's as much the history of my mixed-race cousins as it is mine.
So I've extended that tree. And with DNA, I've added in people who we've identified as the male DNA line all the way back to Flanders. And it's one way of being able to tell, though it can only be done through the men, because Y-DNA is only passed from father to son, women don't have Y-DNA. But the skeleton of the Y-DNA project confirms the paper history, because a number of us have got the written history to match the DNA history. In my case, it's through one of my mother's cousins, because obviously my father wasn't a Sutherland. But it is fascinating.
Thank you so much for your time, Mark, it's been great chatting with you!
Links for further information about the Sutherland Societies:
Clan Sutherland Society in Scotland website
Clan Sutherland Society of North America website
Clan Sutherland Society in Australia website
