General Notes

The following is quoted from the Colonial Families of America, Vol. 5, P 379

The virginia and Nova Scotia families of MacNutt or McNutt , as the name is also commonly spelled, traced their ancestry to a Scotch family in Galloway, MacNaught, of Kilqubanitie. The estate of Kilquhanitie had been in their possession from 1480 until about 1667, when the last of its owners, John, left Scotland for Ireland ,  Accompanied by his four sons. The family of McNaught, of Kilquhanitie thus became extinct in Galloway. The first of the name of MacNutt, who exigrated from the north of Ireland to America was Alexander, who was born in 1656. He came over early in the eighteenth century, circa 1720, and was later followed by several of his sons, some of whom settled in Virginia.Alexander died in Palmer, Massachusetts, in 1746 at the age of ninety years, his wife Sarah, having died there in 1744, aged eighty-four. The second Alexander MacNutt born in Ireland, first settled near Hagerstown, Maryland, shortly afterward removing to Augusta County, Virginia , where he lived on land known as the MacNutt grants, near Lexington. He died there about about 1751, leaving several sons, Alexander, John , William, Robert, James and another, said to have been killed when a lad in an Indian skirmish. There was also a daughter named Jane, Who later married Weir., of Nova Scotia. The most notabel member of the family in the eighteenth century was Col. Alexander MacNutt, who was born in Ireland about 1725 and came with his father, Alexander, to Augusta County, Virginia. He accompanied Maj. Andrew Lewis as a volunteer in the Sandy Creek Expedition against the Shawnee Indians, in 1756 and later served on General Braddock's staff in the expedition against Fort Duquesne. In the spring of 1760, he was in New Enland and assisted in the raising three hundred men for his Majesty's service at Louisbourg. At this time Colonel MacNutt embarded upon vast and ambitious schemes for the re-colonization of Nova Scotia, depopulated by the expulsion of the French Acadians.  The archives of Canada contain volumious records of his transactions with the British and Colonial authorities, many of which have been published.  he visited England several times in the interests of these undertakings, and on his first visit bore letters from Governor Dinwiddie, which procured him an audience of the King.  His Majesty conferred upon him the honorary title of Colonel and tresented him with a sword, in recognition of his services.  The sword despoiled during the Civil War of its silver mountings, is now 1915 in possession of his gd. niece, Mrs. Alexander Glasgow, of Rockbridge County, Virginia. He sided with the patriots during the American Revolution and trough failure to fulfill his contracts, lost the tracts of land amounting to several hundred thousand acres granted him in Nova Scotia. He died unmarried, in Lexingtion, Virginia, in 1811