The Reverend John Dorcas

I need a kilt.

At the Ceilidh dances, I look like an American tourist, what with my Levi's 505 jeans and all. Disgraceful.

Look. I can do the Gay Gordons, the Military Two-Step, the Virginia Reel, the Strip the Willow, the Canadian Barn Dance, the Dashing White Sergeant, the St. Bernard Waltz.

I need a kilt! For god's sake, man!

A kilt is sacred to Scottish Highlanders. The tartan (= pattern on the kilt) is supposed to reflect your clan. The MacDonalds, the Lindsays, the Macleods ... they all have a tartan.

But what is my tartan? Who is my clan? Do I have one, even?

One True Scotsman?

My mother in Green Valley, AZ tells me, "Oh yeah, you have Scottish blood on my side." She looks it up. "His name is Reverend John Dorcas. Married to Elizabeth. Born Scotland 1792. His grave is in Westerville Ohio."

And then I fell down the rabbit hole.

If you have ever done genealogy, you know how addictive it is. Or maybe it's my brain - I love graph theory, forensic analysis and storytelling. Genealogy is all of these things. It looks scientific. It is all lines and circles. It is jigsaw puzzle with perfect interlocking pieces, just waiting for you to find them.

That's what I thought 2 months ago. The truth is, like all things involving humans, genealogy is messy, hard to follow, contradictory, inconclusive.

The last time I seriously dabbled in genealogy was the newly-introduced Genealogy merit badge in Boy Scouts. Back in 1980, the tools were different. There certainly wasn't PC's or the Internet to hold all the digitized records. Everything you discovered was through microfilm and documents, often bound together in flimsy, dirty, hard-to-read books.

In a deeper sense, nothing has changed. 50 years later, there aren't many new records. Most are now digitized and so you don't need to physically travel to them. And there are tools like familysearch.com to connect various records into a cohesive picture. It looks more authoritative. But even connections between these records are human-provided, and prone to error.

Lucky for me I am in Scotland, a country that loves its history, preserves it well, and tells it to anyone who will listen. I began my search for the Reverend John Dorcas at the Scottish Genealogical Society in Edinburgh.

The library is housed in a small close (an alleyway that used to be a private road) that you have to crawl a narrow staircase down to. It was a like a cave. In the narrowly-grouped stacks were piles and piles of record books. A couple of librarians inhabited the place and probably had seen thousands of people like me in their tenure: Americans trying to trace back their roots to Europe.

"Dorcas," they said. "That doesn't sound like a Scottish name."

I scanned through every passenger manifest from Scotland to North America from 1790 to 1810. Nada. And no surnames that even resembled Dorcas. There were a few passengers with Dorcas as a first name, but that was a common woman's name back then because it's Biblical. No last names though.

I looked through US passenger manifests, as the Society had some books for Delaware and Pennsylvania. Nothing there either. And while it's true that these manifests are not complete - this is the 1790's, and there is barely anyone policing this stuff - I thought it odd to find nothing.

The librarians gave me a last piece of advice, "Maybe you should approach it from the American side. New York City has a lot of records."

Visting NYC while on Scottish holiday would be crazy. Ah, but I had the Internet! As long as the records were digitized, I could continue from Edinburgh. And the Edinburgh Central library had an institutional ancestory.com account I could use for free.

The Soldier, The Reverend, The Legend

And there was something on the American side. Here's what I was able to piece together in rough chronological order.

John Dorcas appears seemingly out of thin air. There is no birth record, no christening record, no record (that I can find) of his passage to America.

The first we hear of him, it's 1814 and he's a volunteer for Dixson's 6th Maryland Militia in the War of 1812 ... from August 20, 1814 to September 16, 1814. Less than a month. It wasn't anyone's fault his stay was so short. The war just ended. Saved by the bell, I would say.

After his honorable discharge, he settled around York, Pennsylvania around 1819, married Elisabeth and had 6 children ... none of whom have birth certificates or a record of their birth. But one of the children, Jesse, has a christening record.

That christening record is one of only two documents that definitively lists John's wife Elisabeth, my great-great-great-great-great grandmother. We don't know her maiden name for sure, but my best guess is she was Elisabeth Berkabelle. She happened to be christened in the same church as her son Jesse, and her christening date matches with her age... which is listed on the other recorded document, the 1850 census.

The interesting thing is their name is spelled Darkes. This could be a mis-transcription, or it could be John's name when he crossed over the Atlantic. There is no marriage record to confirm it. But something John's second wife Mary said later will provide independent evidence of the name change.

Then there's a hole from 1821, the birth of their last son John Jr. to 1850. I cannot find him in any census records in 1820, 1830, or 1840.

Around 1850, he and Elisabeth pulled up stakes and moved to Troy Township Ohio. Most of their kids are grown, and his son Andrew (my great-great-great-great grandfather) was married and had kids and moved along with them, eventually settling next door to each. We know this from the Census of 1850, which are the earliest records that John Dorcas appears definitively with name intact. His occupation is listed as "MP", which may be Methodist Preacher - we can only guess since later he will have Reverend tacked onto his name.

Then somewhere around 1853, Elisabeth dies. There is no record of her death - we only know this from anecdotal accounts later.

Three years later in 1856, John Dorcas marries his second wife, Mary Ann McDonal, in the town of Westerville about 50 miles away. At this stage, the records become slightly clearer. He appears on the census of 1860 with a profession of "WB Clergyman". So now he really is the Reverend John Dorcas. In the 1870 census he is listed as "Retired Minister." John and Mary Ann have no children.

Meanwhile, War of 1812 soldiers were granted land parcels as payment for their services. It was a pretty late gesture though, spawned by Congressional Acts in 1850 and 1855. In 1878, a year before his death, the Reverend John Dorcas applies for one of these land parcels. Having served only a month, his request is rejected. But the records he filed with the War Department Pension Office give the most complete details we have of John Dorcas' life.

He died in Westerville, OH in 1879 at the relatively old age of 87. There is no death record, but his tombstone lies in Westerville OH to this day. It has a birth date, but no place.

But Where Was He From?

Meanwhile in 2024, I need a kilt. And to get a kilt, I need to know where my ancestors were from.

Not only do we not know where the Rev John Dorcas was from ... I'm not sure he knew.

The US Census of 1850 introduced a lot more detail than past censuses. For the first time, all household members, their names, ages, birth places and occupations were listed. In the first census that the Rev John and Elisabeth Dorcas appear, it lists John's birthplace as "Scotland."

What's weird is in the 1860 and 1870 censuses, he lists his birthplace as "Pennsylvania." I have not found any birth records of John Dorcas in Pennsylvania, but that doesn't prove much since his children have no Pennsylvania birth records either.

I looked in every known ship manifest from Scotland to the US around the late 1790's and didn't find any name that even came close to Dorcas. At the time, I didn't know he was spelling his name Darkes, but there wasn't even a name that appeared like that.

Ah, but then there's his War of 1812 Pension Record.

This is a really strange entry. Let's say you got on a boat, even as an infant, came over to America, and grew up to enlist in the volunteer army at twenty years old. What are the chances that your parents never told you which country you were from?

There are two explanations I can think of:

• He was not actually raised by his parents in America, or they died soon after, and he was a ward of the state, or adopted, etc.
• -or- He did know his country of origin at some point, but the above entry was written after the fact, when the Rev John Dorcas was infirm and couldn't remember details.

I think the second is more plausible. A part of the same record is the statement:

It might also be that the signer of this document was getting her details from Mary Ann. She couldn't remember the name of John's first wife - perhaps she was never told outright. She even says John lived for the first 40 years of his life in Hagerstown, MD. That is just not true, as John and Elisabeth clearly lived in York Pennsylvania around this time.

About this time, my head is swimming. I'm beginning not to trust the written record.

Adding to the mess, the Census of 1870 adds the question of "Was Your Father of Foreign Birth?" and "Was Your Mother of Foreign Birth?" The Reverend John Dorcas himself answers "No" to both questions and lists his birthplace as Pennsylvania.

His children, on the other hand, tell a different story. The Census of 1880 fleshes out some more detail by asking "Where was your father born?" and "Where was your mother born?"

• In 1870, all four of the Rev John's children (Andrew, Jesse, Elizabeth, and John Jr.) answer "No" to "Was your father of foreign birth"?
• BUT in 1880, all four of Rev John's children answer "Scotland" to "Where was your father born?"

Here is my theory. The Reverend John Dorcas told his kids he was born in Pennsylvania. They believed it for most of his life. Somewhere around his death, between 1870 and 1880, he started singing a different tune. He told his wife Mary Ann and (directly or indirectly) his four children that he was born in Scotland.

His first wife Elisabeth might have known this, hence his listing of Scotland as his birth place on the 1850 census while he was still alive.

So after all this research, going both forward from Scotland and backward from the US ... I still don't definitively know who my clan is.

What About the Kilt?

There's a tartan registry of clan names matched with a tartan pattern. I look up "Dorcas".

Bingo there is a match!

Unfortunately, it's bogus. The tartan is actually a business tartan called Dorcas Check. Yes your company can register a tartan in Scotland. There are tartans for Johnny Walker, Cisco Networking Equipment, and Encyclopedia Brittanica. Groan.

Here's the thing about kilts and tartans. The sacredness comes from wearing any kilt, not the one with the "right" tartan. Kilts were banned by the British in 1746, and wearing one was an act of defiance. Although the British backtracked on this law in 1782 (for fear of a Scottish uprising), the kilt wearing continued on as a tradition.

And if you think about it, how could ever enforce the "right" tartan? Families intermingle. They lie or withhold the truth from one another. They mis-remember key details.

Human lives are messy. I'm starting to get that.

And so, I will probably end up at the Rent-A-Kilt store, getting my kilt in the Used Bin. I want a good kilt, not the cheapo polyester crap they sell to tourists on the Royal Mile, along with a stuffed Hairy Coo and a plastic Balmoral Cap. But a good kilt is expensive. A used one will save me some quid.

I want a kilt that looks good on me.

I keep thinking, with absolutely no evidence to support this ... that the tartan I am drawn to is my clan's tartan, and that all the decisions of my ancestors have led to this moment. I think the Scots, with all their practical mysteriousness, would agree.