Donald Gregory

Donald Gregory (1803–1836) was a Scottish historian and antiquarian, who published a valuable history of the Western Highlands and Isles of Scotland.

Gregory was a younger son of Dr James Gregory (1753–1821), a leading Scottish physician, by his second wife Isabella Macleod (1772–1847), and was one of no fewer than eleven children. His twin brother, William Gregory, was a notable chemist. His grandfather, John Gregory (1724–1773), was a notable physician and moralist and his grandfather’s grandfather, James Gregory (1638–1675) was a mathematician and astronomer. Gregory was accordingly born into Scottish academic purple.

Donald lived at the family home of 10 Ainslie Place in the Moray Estate in Edinburgh for all of his later life.

Gregory became joint secretary to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1828 and sole secretary in 1830. He was also secretary to the Iona Club (devoted to the history, antiquities and early literature of the Scottish Highlands and publishers of the Collectanea de Rebus Albanicis), an honorary member of the Ossianic Society of Glasgow and of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne, and a member of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of the North at Copenhagen.

In 1831, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland published Gregory’s Historical Notices of the Clan Gregor, at the outset of which he noted that

The total want of private papers and title-deeds connected with the different branches of this family … and the defective state of the earlier records of Scotland, in relation more especially to the Highlands, have made this investigation no easy task.

Gregory’s attachment to contemporary documentary evidence was remarkable for his time. The Edinburgh Literary Journal described his work as “the first instance on record of a trustworthy history of a Highland clan resting upon contemporary evidence”.

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