McPhail Family is descended from one "Paul Macphail, goodsir to that Sir Andrew Macphail, parson of Croy, who wrote the history of the Mackintoshes. Paul lived in the time of Duncan, first of the name, and eleventh of Mackintosh, who died in 1496. The head of the tribe had his residence at Inverarnie, on the water of Nairn".

The name comes from Gaelic, meaning "son of Paul". It was first recorded in 1414. Members of the clan were associated with the Camerons, Clan Chattan, the Mackintoshes, and the Mackays, a number of McPhails appearing on a list of tenants on the Reay (Mackay) estates in 1679.

You might find information, links and search engine results for either McPhail or MacPhail. For this website, we consider them to be of the same family and will use McPhail unless we use a direct quotation. Both spellings were used in Scotland and Ireland interchangeably. By tradition, Mc or Mac is saying "the son of ..." Per House of Names, the prefix could also be M' or M'c or Mag or Mcc or M^c.

The Alberta connection came from Cape Breton via southern Alberta in the Crows Nest Pass, a heavy coal mining area. The story starts in Schooner Pond in 1850 and arrives in Calgary in the early 1900's. If you have a McPhail story to tell, please consider registering into the website. It has an easy way for you to add and edit web pages; just check out the tutorial link in the left-hand coumn.

To follow the stories of the McPhails in Canada, go to these links:

• Name Index page for an alphabetical and date name list. The Name Index page will give you links to individual biographies of our ancestors.
• Generations^? page for each generation from Archie McPhail onwards.
• References page for the main sources, citations and references.

You can always find the start page for these links in the column in the left side of the web page. Or, you can start at any of the links below that lead into the children and grandchildren of Archie.

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-- JimBenedict - 30 Dec 2007
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