Some Places Become Holy Simply Because We Lived There

We all feel disconnected at times.

I never met my maternal or paternal grandparents. They had all died before I was born, so I grew up knowing very little about my family’s story. In the 1990s, my oldest sister, Sue, and I began researching our genealogy. The deeper we dug, the more I discovered that I belonged to something much larger than myself. Through those stories, I found a connection to people, places, and a heritage I had never known.

Today I write about one of those places.

I have never been to Ayr, Scotland. I have never walked its streets or stood along its shoreline. Yet I feel connected to it, because it was the home of my ancestor, Archibald McGill, before he sailed to America.

In the early 1700s, Ayr was a small seacoast town of only a few thousand people. Its economy depended on weaving, agriculture, fishing, shipbuilding, and the cloth trade. Life was difficult. Poverty and unemployment were common as Scotland struggled to move from an agricultural society toward an industrial economy. Like much of Britain during that period, slavery and the Atlantic slave trade were woven into the larger economic system, even if Ayr itself was not a major slave port.

As I read about Ayr, I was surprised by how familiar some of its struggles sounded. They reminded me of the rural Mississippi of my childhood in the 1950s and 1960s, where farming families worked hard, opportunities were limited, and many dreamed of a better future for their children.

The McGills left Scotland searching for that better future. They settled first in North Carolina, where Governor Gabriel Johnston encouraged Scottish Highlanders to build new lives in the colony. In the early 1800s, later generations of the family followed the promise of inexpensive farmland into Mississippi. That is where they remained for generations, and where I would eventually be born.

Although I have never lived in Ayr, it has become part of my identity. When I see the McGill tartan, a Highland kilt, or hear the music of the bagpipes, I feel a connection that reaches across nearly three centuries. It reminds me that I did not begin with my own birth. I am part of a much longer story.

Some places become holy because God met us there.

Other places become holy because those who came before us lived there, struggled there, dreamed there, and loved there. Their courage made our lives possible.

For me, Ayr, Scotland, is one of those holy places.