====== MacSweyn, Catherine ====== (20 Aug. 1861-3 June 1951), witness to historical continuity, local authority on pioneer life. (Katie MacSweyn, Kate MacSweyn) Born presumably at the family home, Lot 11, 9th Concession Kenyon Township, GC. Parents: John MacSweyn and his wife Isabel (Isabella) MacLeod. Gaelic was Catherine’s first language. She attended the Cotton Beaver school near the family home. Described in her obituaries as a lifelong resident of Kenyon Township and the Dunvegan area, she was, however, for whatever period of time, employed as a servant in Montreal. As such she belonged to a most honourable and useful occupational group otherwise regrettably little noticed in the present dictionary, namely the fairly numerous GC women who were in domestic service in Montreal and other North American cities. Back home, Katie MacSweyn was over many years an authority on the traditions, pioneer history and genealogy of her area, and was a revered survivor of an earlier generation. A few pages she wrote on one of the pioneer MacLeod families of Skye, Ont., survive, and there are probably other notes and short pieces in private collections; but in general she belonged to the oral not the written tradition of history. A copy of //The Presbyterian Record// (issue of Nov. 1877) in the Glengarry Pioneer Museum, Dunvegan, contains a manuscript note, very anguishedly human indeed, which we may assume to be written by her, and which is copied here in full: “I had another old copy of the Presbyterian Record and an item in the Montreal News that the Rev. Donald Ross and Miss Lucy Baker both of Lancaster Ontario, were appointed to mission work, to the Northwest Territories, in the Presbyterian College Montreal accepted and ordained, //both at the same date// I gave the copy in 1925 to some who wanted to see it and did not return the same. Was very sorry for my loss. C. M. S.” Most lines in the above note begin with a capital letter, as with verse. Ross and Baker are in the present dictionary. A neighbour who knew her remembered how, responding to an unexpected visit of the clergyman, she put a proper dress over her rough farm working clothes, but in the vigour of her conversation (doubtless on the local pioneer history) the dress kept getting worked up, revealing again and again the work-worn old clothes beneath. She was among the older people who provided information for the first edition (1940) of Dr Donald MacMillan’s history of the Kenyon Presbyterian Church. At the dedication of the Memorial Gates at the West Church, Kirk Hill, on 5 Nov. 1950, accompanied by two nieces, “Miss Catherine MacSweyn, in her 90th year… unveiled the Memorial Tablet with the Gaelic inscription on the West pillar.” She died, aged close to 90, at the home on Lot 9, 9th Concession of Kenyon, of her brother Duncan D. MacSweyn, where she spent her later years. Burial was in the Kirk Hill West cemetery (United Church). She never married. ---- //Glengarry News// 8 and 15 June 1951 * private information * MacMillan, //Kenyon Presbyterian Church//, 112 * McCrimmon [West Church] 65 (QF) * family background: //MacLeods//, ii, 144; //Lochinvar to Skye// 306-308 * domestic servants from GC: MacGillivray & Ross 121-123, 136, 579-580, 612; //Bibliography of Glengarry// xxvii [<6>]