Other McFarlands

by David D. McFarland

This page is intended for those who got to my home page by mistake, while looking for someone with a name similar to mine, or while looking for things having to do with Irish (or, for that matter, Scottish) ethnicity.

Looking for a Different McFarland?

• First of all, you should not suppose that the McFarlands are all related and know each other. No doubt all McFarlands (and variant spellings) have a common ancestor, if not someone with a name like "Parlan" or "Faolan" or similar, from somewhere in the distant misty past of an isle off the coast of Europe, then perhaps an African named "Lucy" or a Mesopotamian couple named "Adam and Eve". But the details are missing, so for practical purposes most of us are unrelated.

• I have about a dozen living relatives I can trace who use the McFarland surname. Four are in the United States, in California. The rest are in Ireland, where my late father grew up, in a rural area between Donegal Town and Enniskillen. My McFarland relatives in the U.S. are my wife Lois; my daughter Sarah and her daughter Skylar; and my other daughter Rachel.

  I no longer have living McFarland surname relatives in western Pennsylvania, where I grew up; my father (William J. "Jack") and mother (Blanche) are no longer alive, and my sister (Inis Hadden) still lives there but uses her married name.

• Second, the names "David" and "McFarland" are both fairly common in the United States; I am nowhere close to being the only person with both those names. I once checked the switchboard.com directory, and found that it had 221 listings in the United States for people named David McFarland, of which I was number 137. Among those who listed a middle initial (most did not), it was "D" for seven of us.

• Over the years I have run across a couple of namesakes whose professional interests are at least somewhat related to mine.
  • David [no middle name] McFarland. Back in my graduate student days in the late 1960s, while reading Mancur Olson's book, The Logic Of Collective Action, I was startled to encounter a citation of a work authored by a David McFarland. This one is an economist who specializes in industrial organization, and who is a Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC 27599. When last I checked he had no web pages, but the UNC directory showed him as dxm@uncmvs.oit.unc.edu with telephone (919)966-5342.

  • David E. McFarland. Back when the original IBM-PC was introduced there was hardly any application software for it, but if you had been writing FORTRAN for mainframes, as I had, you could create your own PC software by running your FORTRAN code through a compiler from Ryan-McFarland Corporation, who had previously been in the mainframe compiler business. (It was available both under their own R/M logo and under the IBM logo.) Or, if you preferred, they also offered a COBOL compiler. Shortly before cofounder Donald R. Ryan died in 1991, the software firm was bought out, and it is now the Ryan McFarland Division of Liant Software Corporation. Fortran has apparently been dropped, but RM COBOL is still around. These days my namesake serves as Director of The Cobol Foundation and can be reached as davem@cobol.org or at (619)773-5741.

  • David J. McFarland. Libraries and their online catalogs provide opportunities for serendipitous discoveries, such as my discovery of a book on Intelligent Behavior in Animals and Robots, by David McFarland and Thomas Boesser (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), which gave me a better appreciation of the rich variety of behavior that could be considered "intelligent". This namesake is a Reader at Oxford University, Oxford OX13PS, UK, in the Department of Zoology (david.mcfarland@zoo.ox.ac.uk or telephone +44 1865 271212) and Balliol College (david.mcfarland@balliol.ox.ac.uk or telephone +44 1865 277760).

  • Alas, I am unable to provide comparable information about the several hundred other David McFarlands, but the suggestions below may be of some help.

• When searching directories and such, remember that some listings give only initials rather than full names, so for example it is a good idea to look not only for "David D. McFarland", but also for "D. D. McFarland" and "D. McFarland".

• If a search engine doesn't find the "McFarland" you seek, try inserting an extraneous space between the "Mc" and the "Farland", and search for "Mc Farland" with a space. Don't ask why, just do it.

  Skip directly to the next paragraph! Do not read this paragraph. This way lies insanity. Of course, if you're already insane it probably won't hurt to continue reading. Why search both without and with an extraneous space between "Mc" and "F"? The answer is that some data entry clerks and/or some McFarlands have done it each way, and some software is not smart enough to treat the two as the same name. Some search or sort algorithms, ignoring spaces (or other nonalphabetic characters), treat "Mc Farland" as a single word, alphabetizing it the same as "McFarland". But other algorithms, regarding spaces as delimiters, treat "Mc Farland" as two words, and alphabetize it under "F". (This is not just a hypothetical possibility; from time to time I receive junk mail addressed to "the Farland family" or "Mr. Farland".) Yet other algorithms treat space as a character with its own position in the sort sequence, alphabetizing "Mc F" and "McF" in two different positions, separated by other things. A prominent instance of the latter is the ascii sort sequence, wherein the space (#32) comes before the alphabetic characters (A=#65, etc.), so that "Mc F" with the space would come before "McF" without the space, but "McA" through "McE" would come between them. (As recently as 1996, UCLA installed a new PH server that did it this way until I complained.) And I have seen alphabetizations in which "Mc" and "Mac" were intermingled as if both were spelled "Mac". See? Didn't I warn you not to read this paragraph?

• When searching directories and such, remember there are a number of variant spellings, not just "Mc" vs. "Mac":

  	{Mc   Mac M'  O'  (omit)}
  	{F    f   P   Ph} 
  	{a    ai  ao  e}
  	{rl   l   rr}
  	{and  an  ane in  ing}
  

Migration Between Ireland and Scotland

My Father was born and raised in Ireland, and came to the United States in 1929. As far back as the family's oral history goes, they have lived in Ireland, near the present site along the eastern edge of County Donegal. Their one geographic move was no more than 20 miles or so, and accompanied a change in status, from tenant farmers to purchasers of their own small farm on a long-term mortgage offered during a land reform in the latter 1800s.

But the family's oral history extends back only to around 1800, and thus does not fully answer the query, which ultimately relates to earlier ancestors.

Some people think they can distinguish the two nationalities by spelling, but the hypotheses they suggest are often contradictory (e.g., one saying Mc is Irish and Mac is Scottish, with another saying the reverse), and the various hypotheses don't do too well with the haphazard collection of evidence that has come to my attention. I, for example, wasn't taught either Mc or Mac, but M with an Irish letter that looks like a lower case c, raised, and with two marks beneath it:

That Irish letter was a piece of ethnic heritage I found excessively cumbersome, and abandoned, after taking a typing course in high school. (Is that character on your keyboard?)

There is one spelling hypothesis that does seem to fit a lot of evidence: some spelling variations are due not to national spelling differences, but to personal coincidences of which government or church officials happened to be doing the paperwork in places where literacy was uncommon.

I have read of a MacFarlane clan that once was located in the Loch Sloy area of Scotland, over the hill from the northwest end of Loch Lohmond. I have not traced any of my ancestors to the Loch Sloy area, nor elsewhere in Scotland. Still, my family's oral history goes back only to the early 1800s.

The short answer, then, is: No, as far back as my family's oral history goes, they have lived in Ireland, not Scotland.

The longer answer requires several paragraphs, which follow herewith.

Over the centuries there has been a lot of movement between present-day Scotland and present-day Ireland. And, not so widely known, it has been in both directions. This should not really be surprising, as the North Channel separating the two is only about 20 miles wide at its narrowest point.

Furthermore, present-day Ireland preceded present-day Scotland as the land of the Scots. First appearing in historical writings about the time that the Roman Empire was at its maximum extent, the tribe known as "Scotti" did not live in "Caledonia", which was the northern and western part of "Brittania"; that was inhabited by "Picti". Rather the "Scotti" lived in the central and northern parts of "Hibernia", the island now known as Ireland.

The "Scotti" first invaded and settled in "Caledonia" only around AD 500, after the retrenching Romans had abandoned their attempts to control the northwest corner of their expiring empire. Saint Columba was part of this migratory stream of "Scotti" from present-day Ireland to present-day Scotland, where he established a monastery and began converting Picts to Christianity.

As recently as AD 844, when the Scots consolidated political rule over the Picts, their king Kenneth MacAlpin called his realm "Alba", not "Scotland". I am not sure when the latter name gained currency, but my point here is about migration streams, not about placenames; and there was a significant migration from present-day Ireland to present-day Scotland around AD 500.

Another major migration, this one in the reverse direction, from present-day Scotland to present-day Ireland, occurred around 1600. Several British attempts at colonization or "plantation" of Ireland included bringing in peasant farm workers from present-day Scotland. At least some of them were no doubt returning to the land of their ancestors, "Scotti" who had lived in "Hibernia" a millenium earlier.

Yet a third major migration, during the Irish potato famine of the mid-1800s, had refugees from Ireland fleeing to any destination they could reach. Migration to the U. S. has received more attention, but it would seem likely that many who were too poor to flee to New York or Boston could afford the shorter boat ride to Glasgow.

There have been at least these three major migrations, in addition to more routine migrations on a lesser scale that commonly occur between islands only 20 miles apart. So even though my ancestors have lived in Ireland as far back as I have traced them, it would not be too surprising if some more remote ancestors had migrated one or both directions across the channel that separates Ireland and Scotland.