The Sutherlands are Pop-Pop's mother's side of the family. They came to America from Scotland in the early 1800s, and were mostly farmers.
In Scotland, Clan Sutherland is a Highland clan in the far north of Scotland. Their motto is Sans Peur, French for "without fear." Their crest shows a cat-a-mountain salient proper, sometimes supported by two savages wreathed head and middle with laurel, holding batons in their hands proper. The Sutherland tartan is in shades of blue, green, red, and white; it closely resembles the tartan of the Black Watch, or the Forty-Second Royal Highland Regiment, of which the Sutherland Clan were founding members.
The County Sutherland. By Zacwill6 on Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
The Sutherland crest badge. Public domain.
The Clan Sutherland tartan. Public domain.
The earliest Sutherland we know of was Alex's 5x-great-grandfather Adam Sutherland (1775-?), a farmer in the Scottish highlands. He was born into a Scotland a generation past the Jacobite uprisings, in which the Sutherlands had supported the British. It is probable that he and his family would be affected by the Highland Clearances of the 1700s and 1800s, in which large numbers of small-scale highland farmers were abruptly evicted from their traditional lands to clear the way for large sheep pastures. The Clearances destroyed much of Highland Gaelic culture, and even in the 21st century more highlanders live in the Scottish Lowlands, North America, and Australia than in their ancestral clan lands.
Sometime between June and November 1842 three of Adam Sutherland's children traveled to America: Alex's 4x-great-grandfather George Sutherland (1813-1884), and his younger siblings Adam (1820-1899) and Euffan (1822-1905).
George was a blacksmith who traveled with his wife Agness Cleland (1814-1852) and two children, Margaret and George. A third son, Alex's 3x-great-grandfather Adam (1842-1926) was born on the voyage to America. His family joked that he wasn't a Scotchman but an "Oceanian."
The family settled in Delaware County, New York, in an area full of other Scottish immigrants, near what is now the town of Andes. In 1870 they bought a farm on Cabin Hill which passed through several generations of Sutherlands; many are buried in the Cabin Hill Cemetery. The Bloomville Mirror of July 7, 1859, described Cabin Hill like this:
A little ways out from the meeting house is a rock that hangs out of the bank about high enough for a man to stand under. It was used for a cabin by the men when they were cutting the road over this hill through the woods, before civilization had leveled the forest: and from this it derived its name "Cabin Hill." It is considered by most of its people a very hard hill to cross over.
It is I think one of the healthiest places in all Yankidom-- there always being a pure fresh air. It is high above its neighbors and they will be sleeping in darkness and losing the best part of their time, while the sun is shining in splendid brightness on this hill and its inhabitants improving it.
Adam Sutherland the younger, Alex's 3x-great-grandfather, was a blacksmith and farmer on Cabin Hill like his father George. He married fellow Scottish immigrant Ellen J Scott (1846-1896), who had come to America with her parents when she was six months old. They remained in Delaware County all their lives, although several of their children moved to Tama County, Iowa, and began farming there.
Adam and Ellen's first son was Alex's 2x-great-grandfather George Robert Sutherland (1868-1943), like his father a farmer on Cabin Hill. He married Jane Isabelle "Jennie Bell" Beckwith (1866-1942), whose mother was a Scottish immigrant but whose father's family had a longer history in America. George sold the Cabin Hill farm in 1942.
George and Jennie Bell's second daughter was Helen Sutherland (1900-1986), Pop-Pop's mother and Alex's great-grandmother. She grew up on the family farm at Cabin Hill, worked in Delaware County as a
teacher until she saved up enough money to attend Muskingum College and get her B.A., and graduated in 1927. Afterward she continued teaching in Delaware County, and married farmer Lyman George Faulkner (1903-1946) at the Cabin Hill Parsonage in 1929 when she was 28. They had one son together,
Alex's grandfather, the next year. Lyman was killed in a tragic tractor accident when his tractor rolled on a hill in 1946. Helen continued teaching in Margaretville until she remarried to retired farmer and lifelong bachelor John Elliott Tuttle on September 2, 1952, when she was 52 and he was 65. They moved to Schoharie where, among other hobbies and work in the community, she compiled a Sutherland family history that has been invaluable in our current understanding of the family. It may be downloaded in our resources post. She and John had long lives together.