James KENNAN

1647 - 1691  (44 years)

• Name	James KENNAN
  Birth	1647	Dumfries, SCOTLAND   [1, 2]
  Gender	Male
  Note	Dumfries "was the administrative seat of three of the old counties of southwestern Scotland, and the most important center of that entire region. It was very strongly, indeed almost exclusively, Presbyterian-Protestant. In the wake of the religious wars of the earlier part of the seventeenth century, this was a factor of great importance. The town seems to have included no aristocratic or patrician families in the accepted European usage of those terms. Dominant in the town council of the early eighteenth century were the merchants, the local clergy, and the remaining members of the old medieval handicraft guilds. The leading officials were the burgess (the mayor), the "bailie" (or bailiff, who served as town executive and chief of police), and the magistrates of the local court, who presumably had primarily a juridical function. The burgesses, appointed by the Town Council, served for a term of only one year. Our patriarchal James Kennan was plainly a prominent man about town. He served at one time or another both as burgess and as bailie. In the later years of his life he represented the town, and indeed the entire region, as commissioner to the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh. But beyond that, I know nothing of his person. He was referred to, in a history of Dumfries written in 1746, as "an old Cromwellian," which presumably meant that he had, in the confused religious wars of then recent memory, fought alongside the Cromwellian forces. But if he did, it is reasonable to suspect that it was for restricted and specifically Scottish goals rather than for those of the English Cromwell that he fought. The "lawful son and heir" of James Kennan was one John of that name. He was born, we must assume, somewhere around 1670. He, too, seems to have had a prominent place in the Dumfries community, occupying at some point the position of bailie. And he seems to have had a number of sons, the first of whom, another James, dutifully named after his grandfather, was born in 1693, the remaining births stringing along until 1709. Is it permissible to suspect that this second James was the father of a third one who, born somewhere around the years 1715-1720, emigrated to New England and became the first of the American Kennans?"
  Death	1691	Dumfries, SCOTLAND   [1]
  Person ID	I24041	MM
  Last Modified	11 Aug 2013

  
  

  Children	1. John MACKENNAN,   b. Abt 1670
  Family ID	F6947	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	23 Jul 2023

  
  

• Event Map

  Birth - 1647 - Dumfries, SCOTLAND Death - 1691 - Dumfries, SCOTLAND  = Link to Google Earth

  
  

• Sources

  [S776] Thomas Lathrop Kennon, Kennan Family, (Canon Printing Company, Milwauee, Wisc., 1907), 776. [S818] George F., Kennan, An American Family, (W. W. Norton & Co., New York, New York, 2000), 818.