Digging for my roots

And finding some others

Feb 09, 2026

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Have you ever Googled yourself?

Today, thanks to Substack and social media, it’s not until the third page that anything other than yours truly shows up. Ten years ago, the results were different.

The Murderer

Googling my name in 2015, I was shocked to find this:

At the Autumn Circuit in 1827, JOHN LOVIE, farmer at Futteretden, near Fraserburgh, was tried before Lords Pitmilly and Alloway, for the crime of murder. Lovie was an unmarried man, and had hired a servant girl, of the name of Margaret Mackessar, whom he had been in the way of visiting at her mother’s house previously to his engaging her. Her mother had wished her to go to another service, but she preferred going to Lovie. She became pregnant to him, and, from some evidence which was led in the case, it appeared that Lovie had administered to her a violent purgative, in order to procure abortion. Upon the morning of the 14th August, the woman was seized with violent vomiting, and, after great suffering, died on the afternoon of that day.
The Black Kalendar of Aberdeen. [By James Bruce.]

Women’s lack of bodily autonomy continues to this day.

The report goes on to review the evidence presented at trial, and concludes:

Such was the evidence, upon which a Jury , after deliberating together (if the word “deliberate” can be applied in the case) for half-an-hour, saw fit, to the utter amazement of almost all who had listened to the trial, to return a unanimous verdict of Not Proven . In our humble opinion, there was here furnished a specimen of presumptive evidence, against the accused, of the strongest and most perfect kind which it is possible to conceive. “The Jury,” says Mr. Alison,” misled by the eloquence of Mr. Cockburn, found the libel Not Proven; but the Court were of opinion that the case was clearly made out, -an opinion with which, it is probable, no man of sense, who considers the evidence, will be disposed to differ.”

The failure of the legal system to hold men accountable for crimes against women continues to this day.

Not proven is a peculiarly Scottish trial verdict, and means, approximately, “we know you did it, but we can’t quite prove it beyond reasonable doubt,” a verdict that has a very present-day ring to it.

The trial was notorious enough at the time that a folk song, John Lovie, was written about it. It’s in the Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection volume 2, a copy of which I tracked down in University of Washington library.

It was disconcerting, to say the least, to read that a possible relative—let's call him Bad John to differentiate him from me—was a notorious murderer. I let the matter rest there and went back, in an act of accidental karmic atonement, to improving our community’s water system to reduce the amount of arsenic, the poison that killed Margaret McKessar.

The McKessar cottage (probably), Percyhorner, Scotland 📷 Jane Smith

The Clearances

Like many, I suspect, I turned to researching genealogy during the COVID lockdowns. I knew my great grandfather was from Aberdeen, Scotland, and I was able to trace the paternal line through him back ten generations in all to another John Lovie, born in 1650, a farmer in Wester Cardno in Aberdeenshire, where his son and grandson continued farming. As I wrote in Wester Cardno,

Wester Cardno in those days would have been a township, in an open field system of land tenure called run rig. An area of cultivable land, called “in-bye”, would be divided into strips and assigned to tenants, sometimes by lot. Crops would have included wheat, oats, rye, barley, root vegetables and greens. The “out-bye” was shared pasture and rough grazing for sheep and cattle. The arrangement allowed for community and a degree of communal working.

The defeat of the [Jacobite] uprising ushered in a new era of land ownership and social engineering known as the Highland Clearances, beginning in 1750. A surge in the price of wool and the precarious financial situation of the new landlords drove the enclosure and consolidation of the common grazing areas for sheep, for which they could extract much higher rents. The tenants’ status was reduced from farmer to crofter, with a fixed tenancy and no access to previously commonly held land. They were expected to be employed in other industries such as kelp harvesting or peat cutting.

The theft of the commons started here and, as the sale and privatization of public lands, continues to this day.

In 1749, [1650 John’s great-grandson] Charles, my fifth great-grandfather, was born into this environment. Charles indeed became a crofter and eventually moved away from Pitsligo.

The twin stresses of the enclosures and an increasing population over the following decades meant that farmers had to feed more people from less land, and so were driven to plant potatoes, which could produce up to five times the calories per acre than the traditional turnips. Meanwhile, more farmers were driven from the land, while women, too, needed to find work away from the farm, which for most meant entering domestic service, with marriage the only way out. And so it was that Margaret McKessar began working for Bad John Lovie as a servant girl.

The deliberate and systemic lack of opportunities for women under the patriarchy pushing vulnerable girls and young women into the orbit of predatory men is a story that hides in plain sight and continues to this day.

The Book

While Bad John was not in my direct line of ancestors, it seemed likely that he’d connect to the family tree somewhere, but there were so many John Lovies around at the time that it wasn’t possible to identify this one in the usual genealogy materials.

This past December, I decided to take another look at the records of the trial, in the hope that I’d find a clue there that would let me link Bad John Lovie, I hoped at a safe distance. Right at the top of the search results was a recent book, Three Times Buried, by Jane Smith, with this description:

In Scotland, 1826, Meggy McKessar comes to live and work at John Lovie's Aberdeenshire farm. John's widowed mother is warned Meggy will bring trouble, but she refuses to listen; all she wants is to for the rumours about John's sordid past to be forgotten forever. But when a sudden death casts suspicion on the widow's favourite son, the life she has so desperately tried to preserve threatens to fall apart.
Based on a sensational true crime, Three Times Buried is a sinister tale of torn loyalties, secrets, superstition and murder.

Well, of course I immediately bought the ebook, so I wouldn't have to wait, and reached out to the author. Jane’s an Australian author of historical fiction and non-fiction. Her husband and brother-in-law are descended from the illegitimate son, yet another John Lovie, of Bad John with Helen Chessor, who he’d met before Margaret.

It was very strange and a little distracting to keep reading my name! Fortunately, it’s a gripping book—five stars!—and I read it over two long evenings. Jane had visited the area and done a lot of research and does a great job of weaving that into a compelling story full of local and contemporary detail that really gave me a feel for what my ancestors’ daily lives were like and the hardships they endured. The title refers to the exhumations and reburials of Margaret as part of the murder investigation.

The book mentions Bad John’s sister Mary who married a George Yule. This less common last name let me tie Mary, and through her Bad John, to my own family tree as children of my ancestor Charles’s brother George, making them my second cousins five times removed, Jane’s husband and brother-in-law my sixth cousins once removed, and Jane’s son my seventh cousin. We’re family!

Migration

Twenty years after the trial, the Highland farming communities were hit with a potato famine, mirroring the better-known Irish potato famine both in cause and effect. As tenant farmers were now unable now to feed their families or make rent, some landlords offered them assisted passages to “The Colonies”—the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia—accounting for the prevalence of Scottish family names in these places. Victims themselves of the theft of the commons, these colonizers went on to commit the same sins against the indigenous populations of their new homes.

Settler colonialism has its origins in land theft and economic marginalization and continues to this day.

Jane’s and my branches of the family also migrated, but more slowly, as economic hardship set in. On my side, Charles’ son George was still farming 90 acres as a tenant farmer in 1851; his son, another George, was an agricultural laborer; his son William moved to Aberdeen as a railway carter; his son Andrew moved to York, England as an ironmonger’s assistant; his son Richard to Rotherham, England; his son Richard to Hampshire, England, and his son John—that’s me—to the Netherlands, to New Jersey, and to Washington State.

This is a good time to mention that, according to DNA testing, my Scottish paternal ancestry is Celtic, found predominantly in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Brittany, and traces back to steppe pastoralists in central Asia, while my maternal line is found in the UK but also Galicia, Finland, the middle east, and central Asia, and traces back to Neolithic farmers. Migrants all, and not a drop of “Anglo-Saxon1” between them.

Meanwhile Bad John’s son John moved to Aberdeen; his daughter Helen to Brechin, Scotland; her daughter Sybil to Romford, England; her son John to Tamworth, New South Wales; and his son, Jane’s husband, to Queensland.

Migration has been a part of human life throughout human prehistory and history and continues to this day. The drivers remain the same; theft of common land, economic hardship, and personal insecurity, often interconnected. Only the obstacles, the names we give migrants, and the stories we tell about them, have changed.

Epilogue

Although the trial verdict was not proven, Bad John’s reputation was ruined. No vendors or customers would do business with him. He left the farm tenancy to his widowed mother and moved away, eventually winding up in a poorhouse at St Cyrus.

SUICIDE OF A SUPPOSED MURDERER. The Edinburgh Evening Courant of Saturday has the following paragraph: – A few days ago an old man, named John Lovie, about the age of eighty-four, an inmate of St Cyrus Poor-house, put an end to his existence by cutting his throat with a razor. […] He is believed to have been the John Lovie, farmer at Futteretden, near Fraserburgh, who was tried before Lords Pitmilly and Alloway at Aberdeen, in the autumn of 1827, for the murder, by arsenic, of Margaret McKessar, his servant girl, who was pregnant by him. […] Lovie was never heard to refer to this murder while in the poor-house; but perhaps it may have been the cause of his sad end.
—The Banffshire Journal, 22 December 1863
quoted in Three Times Buried a book by Jane Smith

Bad John’s death offered closure to his family and to Margaret’s, no doubt, but the deep roots of the crime and the verdict are awaiting eradication to this day.