Celebrating the 125th Anniversary of Shaler Township!
Margaret Fay Shaw was born in Glenshaw in 1903, to the prosperous steel manufacturing family of Henry Clay Shaw and his wife Fanny Patchin. She was the youngest of five sisters. She was orphaned at a young age and was brought up by her aunts and sisters before being sent to school in Helensburgh, Scotland in 1920 to study for a year. A talented piano player, here she heard Gaelic song for the first time and decided that was what she wanted to do with her life. After studying music in New York and Paris, she travelled to Scotland and ended up living there for the rest of her life, collecting and transcribing a lifestyle in the Hebrides which no longer exists.
This illustrated presentation will describe her early life in Pittsburgh and the work she carried out in Scotland which has made her one of the world’s most important Scottish folklore collectors, despite being a native of Pennsylvania. She died in 2004 at the age of 101 and is buried on the island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. It took a girl from Pittsburgh to save, for the future, a vital part of Scottish history.
Presented by Fiona J. Mackenzie, MA. MA, Dip. Lib, Aberdeen University and University of the West of Scotland, from the Scottish Highlands. Ms. Mackenzie was the Archivist for the Canna Collections in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland for almost ten years. She will join us via Zoom. Attendees will attend in person at the Library.
