About

The people behind this archive

The purpose of this re-register is to place the names connected to Mackinnon’s Estate back into public view, without softening what the records show. These names were written into plantation ledgers, compensation claims, slave registers, family papers, and colonial documents by people who treated human lives as property (and far less). This site returns to those records without looking away. It names the enslavers, the claimants, the heirs, and the people they tried to reduce to numbers, ages, labour categories, and monetary value.

This work is not finished. The surviving records are incomplete, damaged by silence, and shaped by the people who held no ethics. Each name found is only part of a larger search for lives, families, origins, labour, resistance, loss, and memory. The purpose of continuing this research is to recover as much as possible, to mark what is still unknown, and to treat every person connected to Mackinnon’s Estate with the seriousness and respect they were denied by the system that enslaved them.

Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee

Tasadora Rural · Rural Appraiser

Galicia, Spain · Isle of Skye, Scotland

b. 1988

I trained in rural valuation in Galicia in the late two thousands, mostly learning on the job at a small appraisal office just outside Lugo. A lot of the work was less clean than people imagine: inherited plots, old fincas, bits of land that had been used one way for decades but recorded another way on paper.

I came to Skye more slowly, first through family research into the MacKinnon line, then through crofting records and land cases that felt oddly familiar. Different place, different law, different weather, but the same problem kept coming up: what people live with on the ground does not always match what the documents say.

These days I work between both places. Galicia is usually smallholdings, abandoned parcels, family land, awkward boundaries. Skye is crofts, grazing rights, older claims, and a lot of careful reading. I keep a calendar of site visits, notes, weather, odd details. It helps me remember what the land looked like before it became a report.

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Ronald MacDonald

Forensic Analyser

Edinburgh, Scotland

b. 1991

I started in document forensics in the early twenty tens, at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh. At first it was mostly public records, preservation work, ink, paper, handwriting, the usual slow details. I liked that side of it: not trying to make a big argument, just looking closely enough that the document starts giving itself away.

After a few years I moved into private practice. Now I mostly work with heritage trusts, legal firms, and family historians who need help with charters, estate papers, and land documents. A lot of them arrive with a story already attached, which is usually the first thing I try to ignore.

I’ve ended up spending a lot of time with pre-seventeen hundred Highland charters. Copies of copies, later annotations, missing pages, handwriting that changes halfway through. I keep internal notes on anything that feels off: ink shifts, margins, repairs, layout changes. I prefer documents that still show wear. Once something has been cleaned up too much, it often becomes harder to trust.