On a windswept island 40 miles off Scotland’s northwest coast, a 19th century castle turned museum echoes with Gaelic ballads about homesickness and loss.
For centuries, islanders lined fishing docks below the castle, waving handkerchiefs at ships setting sail for America. Generations of locals left hardscrabble poverty on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, for opportunities abroad.
Lews Castle on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides islands.
Lauren Frayer/NPR
Lews Castle is now home to a museum which includes an exhibit about emigration from the island.
Lauren Frayer/NPR
Among them, in the early 20th century, were all 10 children of a local sub-postmaster, Malcolm MacLeod, and his wife Mary — including their youngest, Mary Anne MacLeod, born in 1912.
She became the mother of Donald Trump.
Donald Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, en route to New York, circa 1932.
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When President Trump arrives in the United Kingdom on Tuesday for a state visit at Windsor Castle, hosted by King Charles III, he’ll also be arriving in his mother’s homeland — a place where his maternal family roots go back centuries.
Trump’s mother was an immigrant, a native Gaelic speaker who learned English as a second language. She and her siblings were part of a phenomenon of family-based migration to the United States, which American immigration hardliners have deemed “chain migration” — and her son’s administration has sought to stop.
A place more accustomed to departures than arrivals
Even in the era of modern air travel, the Isle of Lewis isn’t easy to reach.
When NPR visited in August, via a tiny commercial flight from Glasgow, the pilot got on the PA system to warn that a nasty haar — a Scottish sea fog — might imperil our trip. We had to circle the island several times before attempting to land — the only flight able to do so that day.
Aerial photo of the Isle of Lewis in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.
Lauren Frayer/NPR
It’s a stunning place, sparsely forested, coated with farmland and peat bogs, cut with jagged ravines and lined with a ribbon of white sand lapped by frigid turquoise waters. At its tip, the North Atlantic meets the Norwegian Sea, as you look north toward the Arctic.
It’s a place more accustomed to people leaving than arriving. Local culture is infused with goodbyes, says archivist Seonaid McDonald, who helped curate an exhibit at Lews Castle about emigration from the island.
“From the late 18th century, people began to leave in larger numbers. There was also a severe potato famine here as well as in Ireland in the 1840s,” she explains. “Although they were leaving for reasons of trying to improve themselves, they had a terrible sense of homesickness.” Most went to Canada or the U.S., even more than to mainland Scotland, she says.
The biggest town on the Isle of Lewis, and in the entire Outer Hebrides chain, is Stornoway — population around 7,000. Mary Anne MacLeod grew up in a suburb, a village called Tong — really just a cluster of houses, including the early 20th century squat gray stucco bungalow that was her family’s home.
“The people who left were very poor,” she says. “They might be [abroad] for decades before they could come back to visit — by which time, their parents would have died.”
Even today, “a large proportion of people here have an empathy for those that have to flee their homelands for different reasons, whether it’s oppression, poverty, war,” McDonald says.
The house where Mary Anne MacLeod grew up
Last winter after Trump was reelected, Crichton, the local member of Parliament, sent a holiday card to the White House — from one politician to another, across the aisle, from the old world to the new one, he says — inviting Trump back for a visit.
“If he came home, he’d see his mother’s story, and the hard work, actually! The determination that made America great,” Crichton says. “And it’s still going on! It’s coming from different parts of the world. But isn’t that the story of America? How beautifully and fantastically it renews itself all the time.”
MacLeod, after becoming a U.S. citizen and Mrs. Fred Trump, came home many times over the years, showering neighbors with gifts, sitting in the family pew at church and slipping back into her native Gaelic language — as if she’d never left, locals say.
As a child, Donald Trump joined her at least once. In 2008, he returned with his oldest sister Maryanne and visited that bungalow — staying inside for just 97 seconds, according to media reports at the time.
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