(c. 1740-19 May 1803), clergyman. (often known as Scotus; Alexander MacDonell of Scothouse or Scotus; in Gaelic, Alasdair MacDhòmhnuill) Born in the West Highlands of Scotland. Parents: Angus MacDonell of Scothouse, who was a Roman Catholic, and his wife Catherine MacLeod, who was a Protestant.

     Alexander MacDonell studied at the Jesuits’ Scots College in Rome. He was ordained to the priesthood on 19 May 1767. He served as a priest in the Knoydart area of Scotland. In 1786, he accompanied the Knoydart emigrants to Canada. These were the founders of the community and parish of St. Raphael’s, and Fr MacDonell will always have a place in the history of GC and Canada as the first priest of the parish. It appears, however, from his life in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography that he quarrelled vigorously with his flock at St. Raphael’s, and was not on much better terms with his ecclesiastical superiors. He disliked life in the backwoods, and it was not until 1790 that he could be got to settle permanently in the parish. He was acutely concerned with his own rights and privileges and, it would seem, with his personal comforts. The life in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography was the first detailed biographical study based on documentary sources of a man who, previously, was more a figure in legend than a man about whose life anything much more than the merest outline was actually known. He died at Lachine, Quebec. He was a Gaelic speaker.

     Following Fr MacDonell’s death, after a brief interval in which Fr Francis Fitzsimmons was the second priest at St. Raphael’s, another Fr Alexander Macdonell (later the first bishop of Upper Canada) became the third priest at St. Raphael’s. Especially in 19th-century secondary sources, these two Fr Macdonells are not always clearly distinguished from each other, and were sometimes treated as one man rather than two.

Life in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, V, 523-525 (no one author; written “In Collaboration”) * Sinnsearach 46-50, 84, 167-168: includes valuable personal glimpses, based on tradition, and not wholly consistent with the strongly critical tenor of the DCB life * McLean: index * Kathleen Toomey, “Emigration from the Scottish Catholic Bounds, 1770-1810 and the Role of the Clergy,” Ph. D. thesis, University of Edinburgh (1991), with biog. sketch * genealogical sources: Bibliography of Glengarry County 165 * MacGillivray & Ross: index