Donald Hogg: A Descendant of Robert Hogg, James Hogg's Brother

Don and Sue Hogg;

© Donald Hogg

In February, 1981, Claude Howard wrote an account of “The Hogg Family in Scotland and America,” which was copied and revised by D. Parr in October, 1989 in New Zealand. There was a desire among descendants of James Hogg (1770-1835) and his brothers to draft a more formal document tracing the family line.  In this unpublished manuscript, Howard argues that twenty four members of the Hogg family, adults and children, left Lowland Scotland and travelled to America in the 1830's and 1840's. These were the families of Robert Hogg (1776-1832) and David Hogg (1773-1852), James Hogg’s two younger brothers, who Howard tells us married sisters, Elizabeth and Elinor (or Helen) Oliver respectively.

The first of the Hogg family to journey to America, writes Howard, were two sons of Robert Hogg, William and James, who travelled to America in 1830, five years before the Ettrick Shepherd’s death. By 1832, these two young men were living in Silver Lake, Pennsylvania, where their brother Samuel soon joined them. 

Silver Lake Park, Pennsylvania; Google Image

By 1833, the brothers’ father and mother, and five younger siblings, travelled to America, Robert Hogg dying along the way of pneumonia. Despite his brother’s untimely passing, David Hogg (who had worked for Sir Walter Scott until Scott’s death in September 1832) set off for America in 1834 with his wife and children, where he joined his relations in Silver Lake. Within three years’ time, the Hogg clan had relocated to Broome County, New York, where they established a community named, unsurprisingly, Mount Ettrick. Robert’s daughter Isabelle, was the last to arrive at Mount Ettrick with her husband and children in 1845.  Given its elevation, this location is now home to the Greater Binghamton Airport, formerly Broome County Airport.

Greater Binghamton Airport; Google Image

The descendants of Robert and David Hogg are now scattered throughout the United States. It has come to our attention that one of them, Donald Hogg, a direct descendant of Robert Hogg, now resides in Florence, Oregon, with his wife Susan. He has kindly shared some of his memories with the James Hogg Society, which we now report here:

I remember meeting my Grandfather James Henry Hogg (b. 1871) only one time in Denver, Colorado in the early 1950’s, so I never knew very much about him. My father, George Oliver Hogg Sr., and mother, Anna Laura Pool, left the center of the US to travel to the West Coast early in their marriage and lived mostly in Arizona and California, but resided in Oregon for a time, where my eldest brother, George Oliver Hogg Jr, and I were born. He was born in Portland, Oregon and I was born in Oregon City, Oregon.  My three other brothers, William Miller Hogg, Allen Lee Hogg, and Eddie Ralph Hogg, were born in  Costa Mesa, California, Newport Beach, California (near the Pacific Ocean), and Yuma, Arizona respectively.  All four of my brothers are now deceased and I am the last living of our generation.  Fortunately, I do have a nephew with two sons that are carrying on the Hogg name for our family.

I was born in Oregon City on September 22, 1937 and three months later we moved back to Yuma, Arizona.  In 1941, we had moved to the Newport Beach, California area and were living near the coast when WWII started.  After that my father started working in the construction of military bases and we moved all over the state of California from the central portion of the state to southern California where we finally settled in the city of Corona just before the end of WWII. We lived there all through my schooling and for several years after. I graduated from Corona High School in 1955, worked at different jobs for a few years, and in 1960 joined the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department as a Deputy Sheriff, a job I held until December 1965 when I joined the California Highway Patrol as a State Traffic Officer.  I spent the next 26 1/2 years with the CHP and retired from the Grass Valley CHP office in Northern California in 1992 where we had moved  in 1973.

I met my wife Susan at a night college class in 1959 and we were married in August of 1961, a union that has happily lasted for over 52 years.  We have no sons of our own to carry on the Hogg name. 

My wife and I currently enjoy traveling and taking cruises and have spent a few months in the United Kingdom where we have friends in several places that we have met through my law enforcement career.  We have been able to visit several foreign countries since retirement. In 2004 we moved to Florence, Oregon where we presently reside.  

Don and Sue Hogg; © Donald Hogg

 --Holly Faith Nelson

Alice Munro Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature: The Connection to James Hogg

Alice Munro
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2005/aug/24/edinburghfestival2005.edinburghfestival
In the Public Domain

Alice Ann Laidlow Munro is indeed the "first Canadian women to win [the] Nobel literature prize," as reported by CBC News. But perhaps more importantly to readers of this blog, she is also related to James Hogg through Hogg's mother Margaret Laidlaw. In her book The View from Castle Rock (Douglas Gibson Books, 2006), Munro shares with her readers her connection to the Ettrick Shepherd. She identifies the maternal uncle of James Hogg, Robert Laidlaw, as her "great-great-great, great grandfather" (6).

Munro read Hogg's works and is known to have drawn on them in her own writing, most notably in her short stories "A Wilderness Station," "Changing Places," and "Friend of My Youth as well as in the short story collection The View from Castle Rock. In the abstract for his article "Taking Possession: Alice Munro's 'A Wilderness Station' and James Hogg's Justisfied Sinner," published in Studies in Canadian Literature, Adrian Hunter writes of the similarities between Hogg's and Munro's writing strategies:

Alice Munro's purpose in recasting James Hogg's A Justified Sinner as she does is to be found in the way Munro's historical narrative endeavours to exempt its central character from the controlling impositions of narrative history. It is this staged aversion to any form of narrative “capture” that lies at the heart of her meditation upon Hogg; it is a key element in Munro's mature fictional aesthetic. “A Wilderness Station” does not so much restage the religious drama of Justified Sinner as offer an exposition in imitative form of the moral and artistic values that convolve within it. Much like Hogg, Munro works backward from assumed knowledge toward contradiction and uncertainty. Both authors write historical fictions that attempt to accommodate within their narrative praxis the inevitability of resistance to, and qualification of, the stories they tell – stories that refuse to take possession of their subjects. 

In "Dream Leaps," her review of The View from Castle Rock published in the London Review of Books, Tessa Hadley touches on Hogg's and Munro's shared authorial positioning:

James Hogg’s privileged movement between the old ways of the valley and the modernity of Edinburgh’s literary culture mirrors the way Munro has always positioned herself, mediating the old-fashioned rural Canada she grew up in for a sophisticated cosmopolitan readership. Even when her writing is preoccupied with particularly modern dilemmas – sexual freedoms or the breaking-up of the framework of marriage – her almost anthropological long view is so penetrating because of her vantage point between systems. Hogg, moving beyond the closed world of the valley, is able to have a ‘historical awareness of the recent past’ and a vision like Scott’s of the ‘importance of something that was vanishing’: the same vision gives urgency to Munro’s writing. The vantage point of the inside-outsider isn’t ever comfortable, though: it is open to discounting from both directions. 

And in "The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Afterlives," published in The Edinburgh Companion to James Hogg, Gillian Hughes reflects on the "narrative connections" between Hogg and Munro. 

These and other connections between the lives and writings of Munro and her relative and literary predecessor James Hogg deserve further study.

 --Holly Faith Nelson

The Hugh McNaughtan Lecture

James Robertson

award-winning author of novels (The Fanatic, Joseph Knight, The Testament of Gideon Mack, And the Land Lay Still, The Professor of Truth), short story collections, and poetry will speak on

 

‘The strange case of

Dr Jekyll, Mr Hogg, and the

Reverend Gideon Mack’

 

Lecture Theatre A96
Pathfoot Building, University of Stirling
4.00 p. m., Wednesday 20 November 2013
 

Hosted by the James Hogg Society
with the Division of Literature & Languages, School of Arts & Humanities
 

A L L   W E L C O M E