Hello Sheldon; I will have to keep this short and post a couple of times as I have twice lost what I have written. I guess from what you write that you have access to the book \'A West Wind to East Bay\' that covers the family and was written by Fr MacMillan whose own family were from close to your mother\'s in Daliburgh South Uist. Though he may well also have been a tailor, it is not Niall brother of Angus but Niall\'s son Niall Ruadh who the book points to as handy with a needle.
Your family, seemingly via a descendant of Niall ruadh, is also recorded in the MacMillan DNA project. It is classified as R1b, generally regarded as the marker for the Western Atlantic groups including the Gaels, who settled Ireland and some of whom, as the Scots, migrated across the Irish sea, most famously in 500 ad, to form the little Kingdom of Dalriada in Argyll and the Isles. However, much earlier, these R1b folks migrated from further east and south in Europe and one group seems to have broken away and turned north to settle in Scandinavia, developing a distinctive variant of R1b that is noted in DNA tests by a sequence of letters ending 5b. This is the subset revealed by testing of your family. Genetically, you are thus Norse from a line that settled in Orkney and Shetland, in the Western Isles and even in some cases in Ireland |