The closest I could get to Flew is Flewellen or Flewelling though there seems to be no relationship. Finding myself so drawn to the Scottish culture, I thought sure I had overlooked something and thus started on a mission to discover my true Scottish roots.
While at the old Nashville Scottish Games (held at the original beautiful Grasmere venue), I discovered that I might be related to the MacFarlane clan through my Grandfather on my Mother’s side. My middle name is Wylie and it was listed as one of their septs right there on the chart. After some discussions, in which I revealed that my mother was actually adopted and that my Grandfather Wylie was not, in fact, blood related, he allowed that , for the $20 sign up fee, I could still become a MacFarlane. You gotta love the Scotts!
After exhaustive research, I have traced the Flew family heritage back to its true Scottish roots. It got much easier when I discovered that the Flews come from the coastal region of And I was even more surprised to discover that we may be the last surviving sept of a clan less well known in Southern Scottish history -
So, eventually the McMuffin clan was up to their skein dhus in chickens and, of course, eggs. Always looking for another way to make a pound, they combined the eggs with the most readily available local sandwich material (the English muffin) and came up with the McMuffin version of the Scotch Egg. As the McMuffin clan began to decline in the early 20th Century and with the rise of the White Castle in the 1920’s, the last chief of Clan McMuffin, old Angus MacFergus MacTavish MacMuffin (McMuffin), sold the secret of the clan delicacy to the MacDonalds (or as they came to be known in the States, McDonalds). Being without male heir, the direct McMuffin line ended there.
Meanwhile back in the hulks of the Bold ‘45, the McMuffins, who had been eating chicken cooked on a flat rock for some 500 years, had their Chief of the day call for a chicken cooking contest. While the Saunders of Clan MacDonell had the secret for fried chickenand the Bar-As a sept of McMuffin, the Flews are permitted to wear the traditional tartan. They had migrated from the Highlands of Caithness after the Battle of Flodden Fields in the early 16th century. Tradition has it that a lowly chicken herder, Magnus Flew, came across one of the Fey folk and in the attempt to corral the faerie, he came away with only his wee pants. From this he was inspired to cross the Highland plaidie with the lowland pants to obtain a garment referred to as a cuölohtè. Part of it’s advantage was that the men of the family could wear the traditional undergarment (or lack thereof) without worrying about their stuff falling out the bottom.
The saga of Clan McMuffin and, in particular, the Flew Sept is clouded in time and based on old family tales uttered around the fire late at night. However, today we have the advantage of the Internet which, while often still suspect, is generally more reliable than reading the entrails of goats or the casting of chicken bones. One such resource is Ancestry.com which gives us access to records that heretofore could only be acquired by extensive travel and time spent in dusky record vaults. So, since my retirement, I have spent many hours on Ancestry.com researching the
Flew lineage as well as that of my mother, and here I present a more concise presentation of the more recent history of Sept Flew.
Genealogy can be easy or, well, difficult. In a large family with a full set of grandparents, it generally falls in the easy category. But, of course, not the Flews! My grandparent Flews left this world ten years before I came into it. And all of my grandfather’s brothers died before him. Fortunately, of Dad’s four sisters, our Aunt Mae lived to be 98 and passed a lot of information to my sister including a few pictures and letters.
While I knew that the Flews had come to the States from Southern Scotland, I now know that they probably originated in southwest England. From there they seemed to form three distinct groups of Flews. One group in Dorset County, particularly on and around the Isle of Portland, with a second in west Somerset and the third, including my line, in north Somerset and the old Gloucestershire County. In particular, my Flews centered around Long Ashton, just south of Bristol.
My earliest known ancestor that I have discovered was William Flew (my great great grandfather) who was born about 1790 in Long Ashton and married Sarah Watkins who hailed from Tralick, Monmouthshire, Wales. (While William was definitely descended from old Magnus, I have yet to make the tie.) I conclude that they met in Wales since at two of their first three children were baptized in Wales. Their first child, Mary Ann, was christened in Long Ashton and died at the age of 14. Oddly enough, most births were not recorded in these old English records and the birth has to be derived from their more available christening records. More accurate birth locations can be found in census records. Unfortunately, the first English census was taken in 1841 and Mary Ann passed away in 1838. It’s possible that she was born in Wales, but without the census records, it is not certain.
In 1839, they had another baby girl which they also name Mary Ann. The practice of naming the child following the death of a younger sibling the same as the deceased was not uncommon. I found one instance where two male
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children died at an early and they, along with the next born child, were all given the same name.
Old William spent at least his middle years as an “agricultural labourer”, fancy for farm hand. He spent his later years as a gardener, probably in the hire of the local lord. In fact, his youngest son, William, in a letter from his wife. A. M., to my grandfather, was said to be the gardener for Lord Ashton. Quite often, these jobs were passed from father to son. He and Sarah had a total nine children, one of which was my great grandfather, George, born about 1830 in Long Ashton.
Sometime between 1863 and 1870, George, along with his wife Mary Ann Martin, and sons, Frank Francis (age 11 and my grandfather), Lawrence (age 9) and William George (age 7), migrated to the States. After their arrival, they lived in Omaha and then Indianapolis. Between the 1870 and 1880 census records,
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Lawrence disappeared and I assume he died. His age would have been less than twenty. William George went on to be an Engineer for the GM& O railroad, residing in Texas. In 1926, he perished in a railroad accident near Bell, Texas, his death recorded as "caused by scalding".
Sometime between 1876 and 1890, Frank Francis moved to Jackson, Tennessee, where he resided till his death in 1936. In 1898, he married Sarah Jane “Sallie” Stuart who was from Jackson, Mississippi.
According to Aunt Mae, while working as a Locomotive Engineer for the IC Railroad, he met Sallie in Jackson, MS. In 1908, Frank Thomas, my father, was born the only boy with four sisters. It was natural that they referred to him as “Brotha”.
Initially we were only able to trace the Stuart line to John Thomas Stuart, Sallie's father and my great grandfather. John Thomas immigrated to the States along with his father, William and Sarah, and his siblings. However, there is no evidence of the either William and Sarah arriving and it is possible that they died in transit. John, along with his six siblings were recorded in the 1850 US Census living with Isabella Magee in New Jersey.
In 2018, along with John, Cissy and her husband, Tom, we travelled to Co Armagh Ireland. Here at the Tyrone Ditches Presbyterian Church, where William and Sarah married in 1826, we found a tombstone enumerating several Stuarts that we determined to be our ancestors. From this information, I was able to finally trace our John Stuart, our 8th great grandfather, who was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1645. He immigrated to Ireland in 1695. This finally confirmed our Scottish heritage. For more details on the Stuart Family see Chapter 2 - The Stuarts.
A final note to the Flew migration. Mary Ann Flew, born in 1839 and great grandpa George Flew’s younger sister, married Samuel Lovell in 1864. Samuel and Mary Ann were listed in the 1881 English census, which was taken in April of that year. Samuel died in Oct of 1881. In George’s will written in 1891, he bequeathed “to my sister Mary A. Lovell, the house & Lot that she now lives in No. 113 Johnson St. Jackson Ten”. Sometime between the death of Samuel and 1891, she had migrated to the States. According to Aunt Mae, she is buried in the Hollywood Cemetery at the feet of her brother, George. Unfortunately, her headstone is no longer legible and many old cemetery records were destroyed in a fire.
For more on the Flew family, see Chapter 1 - The Flews, The Story of Jesse Eric Curtis, Jr. and William the Conjuror.
