Dougal Ciar and the chiefly line

The Glengyle branch of Clan Gregor takes its name from Dougal Ciar - Dubhgall Ciar - hence Clann Dubhgall Cheire. The About page glosses his place in the family quickly as “closely related to the chiefs.” It’s worth pinning down what that actually means.

Amelia MacGregor’s History of the Clan Gregor takes a position on this in chapter 18, on the House of Dougal Ciar. Her reconstruction is that Dougal Ciar was a younger son of an earlier chiefly figure, Gregor Aulin, who died at Glenurquhay in 1415.¹ On that reading the Glengyle line is a cadet branch: it splits off from the main line of chiefs a generation or two before the proscription-era figures who dominate the later clan history, and is not itself in the chiefly succession.

Two things to keep in mind about that reconstruction:

• Amelia is openly tentative. She notes that the immediate ancestor is not in the Chronicle of Fortingall and that the family does not appear distinctly in the records before 1533.¹ The Gregor Aulin link is the best reading available, not a documented one.
• The clan’s own reckoning treated the Glengyle house as senior - traditionally “fourth or fifth in point of seniority” within Clan Gregor¹ - even where it isn’t formally counted among the principal Houses.²

Things still to chase:

• Two reconstructions of the father. Amelia names Gregor Aulin (d. at Glenurquhay 1415) as the immediate ancestor; the Glen Discovery compilation gives Eoghan / Ewin (b. ~1410, d. before 1488) instead.³ The two readings are not reconcilable as they stand, and the cadet relationship to the chiefs depends on which is taken. A side-by-side of the Glenstrae and Glengyle pedigrees up to the point of divergence would put the question in one place.
• The 1488 record. Dougal Ciar is named in GD112/3/9 in 1488 - the earliest documentary trace.³ On the Glen Discovery dating (b. ~1458) he would then be in his thirtieth year, which is what underwrites the figure used here and on the timeline.

For the line of chieftaincy itself - generations I to XII, from the eponym to the lateral succession of 1897 - see the separate sketch at Chieftaincy line of Clan Dougal Ciar.

Footnotes