Mightier Acorns

Still Progress, But Not The Kind I Wanted

Last time I wrote about the Livingston family, I said this:

…I finally decided to take some time to put a WikiTree profile together for James. After spending about five hours combing through the records and drafting a new profile page, I discovered that he and his wife already had WikiTree pages!

This was great because I was able to add my work to an existing page that (now) adds several generations to the Wavetops for my Livingston ancestors. I also learned that James Livingston’s origins were in Cleish, Kinross-shire, Scotland, which I did not know before!

As it turns out, the reason I did not know that before is because it might not be true. To understand why, we have to zoom out and look at all of the available evidence.

The Case for James Livingston

If you read the whole post Shine a Light on the Livingstons, you know that James Livingston‘s life after his marriage Elizabeth Clemson in 1782 is well documented in the Quaker records. But where he came from before that is less clear.

When I found the WikiTree profile for James, it cited three key pieces of evidence for information about James Livingston’s life before he married:

• James Livingston and Elizabeth Clemson’s marriage record
• A biographical sketch of his (possible) nephew in the History of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania¹
• A birth record in Cleish, Kinross-shire, Scotland

The marriage of James and Elizabeth is recorded in a secondary source, “The Clemson family of Pennsylvania, 1701-1968”² which gives us the date of the marriage and James Livingston’s name, but the county record³ that confirms the secondary source account also provides the name of James’s father: William Livingston. (From here out, I’ll refer to him as “William Sr.”) William Sr.’s name is given in this record as “Wilhelm Lewyton,” and James is “James Lewyton,” but considering that the marriage took place in a German church⁴, and there don’t appear to be any other records with that spelling, I will assume for now that this is the only time their name was rendered as anything besides “Livingston.”

The family described in History of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania may be our Livingston family, but I have yet to find records that conclusively show that the James Livingston named in this sketch is the same as our James Livingston. (I am inclined to believe that this is the same Livingston family, but I can’t be certain, yet.)

Here is the relevant paragraph from Isaac Livingston’s biographical sketch:

…[Isaac’s] grandfather, William Livingston, emigrated with his family, consisting of wife and four sons, to wit: William, John, Isaiah, and James, from Ireland in 1766, and settled in Lancaster County. John lived with his brother William in Salisbury until his death, and was buried in the Salisbury burial ground. He was never married. Isaiah and James moved to the West.

You will note that this passage doesn’t give us much detail. If this is James’s family, all we learn about him is that he had three brothers, their (very common) names, and the detail that they came “from Ireland in 1766” – which will be hard to refute or verify. We know from the Quaker records that James “moved to the West” and died in Warren County, Ohio, but I have not yet found any records that tell me where Isaiah Livingston lived (either in Pennsylvania or in “the West”).

Later in Isaac’s sketch, we are told that his father, James’s brother William (who I will refer to as “William Jr.”), was twelve years old when he arrived in America, which would put his date of birth in about 1754. The sketch also tells us that William Jr. and his wife, Jane Allison, were Quakers – a detail that may or may not be important, since we know most of what we know about James Livingston from Quaker meeting records. (I have not found a record of William Jr.’s marriage to Jane Allison outside of this sketch.)

So far, the only record containing evidence about James Livingston’s birth comes from his appearance in the 1800 Census, which counted him in the “45 and older” category – putting his birthdate before 1755. All we know for sure is that we are looking for a man born about 1755 to a father named William. He may have had three brothers (William, John, Isaiah), and they may have come “from Ireland,” but even if the book’s account is accurate, that doesn’t mean any of them were born in Ireland.

I don’t have any way of knowing how the person who found the 1754 Scottish birth record decided that the James Livingston born in Cleish parish, Kinross-shire, Scotland, was a match for the James Livingston in the Lancaster book. The citation on WikiTree came from FamilySearch⁵, but I also found it on Scotland’s People.

(Scotland’s People is operated by the UK government and is free to search, but copies of the original records must be purchased to be viewed. Ancestry and FamilySearch license parts of that digitized database, so most of what I have been able to review consists of index records, and not the originals. I can’t link to this evidence, but I’ve built profiles for these families in Ancestry, and I’ll link to those later if you want to inspect the evidence for yourself.)

That birth record tells us that James Livingston’s father was William Livingston, and gives his mother’s name as “Isobel Alexander.” Scotland’s People allows several useful searches, so I looked for other children of those parents⁶, we do find several brothers and sister:

• James (1754),
• John (1755),
• Peter (1758),
• Peter (1760),
• William (1764),
• Alexander (1766), and
• Isabel (1768).

I also found death records in Cleish for several of these children – William died in 1766 at age 2, Isabel died at age 1 in 1770, and both Alexander and the second son called Peter (born in 1760) died in 1775. Since the boy named William died in Cleish in 1766, he can’t be William Jr., and there is no evidence that William Sr. and Isabel had another son called William.

There is also no brother named “Isaiah” in this family, and the fact that the deaths in 1775 occurred in Cleish suggest this is not the family from the sketch of Isaac Livingston. (I searched extensively and found no records that anyone named Isaiah Livingston was born in Scotland between 1740 and 1780.)

But all that tells us is that the family in History of Lancaster County is not the family from Cleish – we still don’t know which of those two families the James Livingston who married Elizabeth Clemson belonged to.

So Where Was James Livingston Born?

Based on what we know for sure, James Livingston’s father was named William, and James was born sometime before 1755. So, assuming he was born in Scotland, he could be the James Livingston in any one (but not all) of these families. These links go to my Ancestry tree “The Nancy Witter Project” if you’d like to review the evidence there:

1. James Livingston – b. before 1755, no place of birth named in documents, son of William Livingston (mother’s name not given), lived in Lancaster County, PA. May have immigrated in 1766. Brothers William (abt. 1754), Isaiah, and John.
2. James Livingstone – b. 17 March 1745 in Queensferry parish to William and Elizabeth (Moncrief) Livingstone. Siblings: Katharine (1733) and William (1741).
3. James Livingston – b. 3 September 1750 in Fossoway and Tulliebole parish to William Livingstone (prob. mother – Margaret Kid) Brother: Andrew (1752), half-siblings (children of Isobel Graham): Mary (1755), John (b. 1756), Isabel (1758-1759), John (1759-1760), Isabel (b. 1763).
4. James Livingston – b. 20 July 1753 in Duddingston parish to William and Sibylla/Isobell (Halyburton) Livingston. Siblings: Jean (1755), William (1758), Isabel (1761), Isobell (1763), Andrew (1765), Robert (1768), David (1770).
5. James Livingston – b. 13 Jan 1754 in Cleish parish to William and Isobell (Alexander) Livingston. Siblings: listed above.
6. James Livingston – b. 25 August 1756 in Pencaitland parish to William and Elizabeth (Case) Livingston; OR James Livingston – b. 4 September 1757 in Pencaitland parish to William and Elizabeth (Cass) Livingston. (If these two records are showing the same parents, then the first boy may have died in infancy.)

If we accept that the first family on the list, the family described in History of Lancaster County…, is our Livingston family, then we have to rule out the Scottish candidates for not fitting that family’s description. We have also not looked for candidates in Ireland, yet. (Because I don’t know where to look – any suggestions for a good online resource?) While the book doesn’t necessarily state that the Livingstons lived in Ireland, we should at least look there for evidence.

Unfortunately, that leaves us in limbo. I have suggested changes to the Profile Manger for James Livingston’s WikiTree page, but he removed what I put in the Research Notes section as “speculation” (which is what the Research Notes section is for), and since the evidence we have is inconclusive, I’m honestly not sure what changes would be appropriate to make.

So for now, James Livingston remains a Wavetop/Brick Wall, until we can find better evidence of his birth.

1. History of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men. by Ellis, Franklin, 1828-1885; Evans, Samuel, 1823-1908, joint author. Publication date 1883. Part 2. Page 1059. https://archive.org/details/historyoflancast02elli/page/n1209/mode/2up?q=Livingston. ↩︎
2. BELL, Raymond M., et al. “The Clemson Family of Pennsylvania, 1701-1968,” (FamilySearch link), page 3. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania by Raymond Martin Bell, Washington, Pa., Frank R. Baird, West Chester, Pa. and Margaret S. Ward, Oil City, Pa.. (Washington and Jefferson College Washington, Pennsylvania 1971) ↩︎
3. “Pennsylvania, County Marriages, 1775-1991”, citing Digital film/folder number: 007718478; FHL microfilm: 000844565; Image number: 574 (FamilySearch link: accessed 7 September 2025), James Lewyton, son of Wilhelm Lewyton, marriage to Elisabeth Clemson, daughter of Thomas Clemson, in 1782 in Pennsylvania, United States. ↩︎
4. “Pennsylvania, U.S., Compiled Marriage Records, 1700-1821”, Original data: Pennsylvania Marriage Records. Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania Archives Printed Series, 1876. Series 2, Series 6, (Ancestry link: accessed 7 September 2025): Elisabeth Clemson, child of Thomas Clemson, marriage to James Lewyton on 6 Dec 1782 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. ↩︎
5. “Scotland Births and Baptisms, 1564-1950”, database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XYK8-MHQ : 11 February 2020), James Livingston, 1754. ↩︎
6. If you search for “Isobel Alexander” on the SP site, be sure click on “Search tools” next to the “forename” field and set it to “Fuzzy matching” instead of “Exact names only” – her name is spelled in a variety of ways. ↩︎