Mary Cameron MacGregor
Mary Cameron MacGregor was the wife of Reverend Gregor MacGregor, the parish minister on the Isle of Lismore for nearly 50 years. Her diary, for a single year (1868), passed from her son to a grandson in the USA, and returned to Lismore by a combination of unlikely events.
Amongst the regular notes about weather and health, it preserves details of manse life and duties from another era, when the minister’s wife was left with all of the responsibilities of running the household, including securing the food supply from the glebe and garden. Mary’s responsibilities were unusually onerous because, with an extensive and scattered parish, her husband was frequently away from home, subjected to the uncertainties of ferries in stormy winters.
The diary also provides surprising insights into the degree of ecumenism in the years following the Great Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843; and the scattered notes on severe weather and natural history are important in understanding what was the warmest year in Europe on record until the last decade of climate change. In short, the diary offers a unique insight into an island community in the mid nineteenth century.
Her diary has now been transcribed by Robert Hay, Caroline Bath and Barbara McDougall, members of CELM, and is available in full on the Regional Ethology of Scotland website:
Mary Cameron MacGregor’s Lismore gravestone