Genealogy

There are several possibilities for why people came to have the last name “Sutherland”. Historically, Sutherland referred to a geographical region south of Caithness, to the Vikings who named it, and it also refers to the Earldom of Sutherland, an ancient earldom in the Scottish Highlands. Some people from the Sutherland region took on that place name at the time family names became popular. The first Earls of Sutherland were all men whose family name was de Moravia, with ancestry traced to a Flemish knight who likely crossed the English Channel around the time of William the Conqueror’s invasion. During the 13th and 14th centuries, the family name changed from de Moravia to Sutherland. Later, men of other families who married a daughter took the Sutherland name if it was associated with a significant title and/or property. De Moravia/Sutherland men were Earls of Sutherland only until the death of the 9th Earl. Going forward, the Earls were descendants of a sister of the 9th Earl, Elizabeth Sutherland, who married a man from Clan Gordon.

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Many of us want to know who our Sutherland ancestors were. Where did they live, what did they do, and why did they emigrate to Canada? There are two ways that someone with a connection to the Sutherland surname can sort out their specific relationships to Sutherlands of previous generations. One is traditional genealogy, using a variety of documentary sources of information, birth/baptism records, marriage documents, death certificates, immigration documents, ship logs, certain documents listing property ownership or transfers, court filings, verified family trees, and so on. For a variety of reasons, many people attempting to reconstruct their family histories in Scotland encounter a brick wall looking back in time from sometime in the 1600s. The second way is through genetic genealogy. A powerful approach involves sequencing the Y-chomosome. The Y chromosome, almost always passed from fathers to sons, slowly accumulates, century by century, permanent changes in the sequence of its molecular information. Analyzing the specific changes that a person carries in their Y chromosome can establish a lineage of paternity, going back, in principle, to the origin of humanity. For those with an unbroken written genealogy, a specific individual from centuries ago can sometimes be identified with some degree of confidence who was the first to have a specific Y chromosome change.  Everyone who has that change is descended from that person. Many of the significant Sutherland lineages descend from William Sutherland, 5th Earl of Sutherland, including the Sutherlands of Forse, of Dunbeath, and of Killipheder.  William’s father, Kenneth Sutherland, 4th Earl of Sutherland, had younger sons who gave rise to the lineage of Sutherland of Duffus and of 1st Langwell. Many Sutherlands in Canada are almost certainly related to these lineages. Sutherlands came to Canada at various times, especially in waves from Orkney and the Highlands, employed by the Hudson's Bay Company, during the Highland Clearances, and at the time of the Red River Settlement.

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Here is a link to a page with some online resources to support traditional genealogy.

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Here is a link to the Sutherland DNA Project.