Origins of the Alexanders

The Alexander family of Scotland, Ireland and North America is descended from the MacDonald clan, which is itself descended from Norwegians, who settled on the islands of what is now Western Scotland in the mid-12th century. The sons of the Norwegian leader Somerled were related through marriage to Malcolm III, son of King Alexander I of Scotland. Somerled and his eldest son were killed at the Battle of Renfrew in 1164. Somerled' grandson Donald founded the house of MacDonald (son of Donald). Donald's grandson Alexander founded the house of MacAlexander, which later became simply Alexander. William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling and Viscount of Canada was born in about 1567. He received a royal charter on the 10th of September 1621 to found New Scotland (Nova Scotia). On the 22nd of April 1635 his land grant was enlarged to include the enormous area covering the entire Atlantic coast of North America, from the Isle of Stirling (now Long Island, New York), to New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maine to Newfoundland in what is now northern Canada. This is a distance of over a thousand miles (1,620 kilometers). Sir William Alexander was a talented poet and playwright. King James I chose him to translate the Book of Psalms for the King James version of the Bible, which is still in use today. Seven Alexander brothers and two sisters immigrated via Ireland to America, in about 1679, and settled in Somerset and Cecil Counties, Maryland. Later in 1750, some Alexanders moved to North Carolina, where they were active in founding Mecklenburg County and its capital Charlotte. Abraham Alexander was the chairman of the committee that produced the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence from England on the 20th of May 1775. This was over a year before Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence for the thirteen colonies. Although Thomas Jefferson said he had never heard of the Mecklenburg Declaration, he used some of the exact phrases in his declaration. Six Alexander, and some of their cousins, signed the Mecklenburg Declaration. This was a declaration of one under-populated county with a population of about eighty free white people declaring their independence from the most powerful force on earth. Between June and August 1775, there were four references to the Mecklenburg Declaration in the North Carolina Colonia Record. The Colonial governor called Mecklenburg County a hornet's nest of insurrection. To this day Charlotte uses the Hornet as its logo. Abraham's son Dr. Isaac Vardrey Alexander, born in 1749, graduated in medicine from Princeton University. He practiced medicine in Charlotte for about eight years, and then he moved to Camden, South Carolina in either 1780 or 1784. He continued to practice medicine in Camden for nearly thirty years. He was mayor of Camden and served as a surgeon in the American Revolutionary War. Dr. Isaac Alexander's son Isaac Brownfield Alexander, born in 1812, was a talented and well-known portrait artist and silversmith. He painted the self-portrait on the cover of this book, while looking in a mirror at the age of seventeen. He specialized in miniature portraits on ivory to wear inside lockets. He also painted the large banner that hung over the secessionist committee table before the Civil War. He was a pioneer in daguerreotype photography.