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Could it be a misreading of Cot House i.e. Cottar House (at) Burnhouse? In other words a house occupied by a farm worker and family who is obliged to provide labour as required?

I am sure that my tracking of the McKellar family is correct.

Yes, I agree.

It's the next steps back that are potentially more difficult to be sure about.

I assume that in this case the Nancy= Anne

I keep reminding myself never to make assumptions

In every one of the baptisms of the family of Duncan Campbell, his wife's name is recorded as Agnes McKoel. There is not one single original record on Scotland's People naming a Nancy McKoel. So you don't need to account for Nancy=Agnes or for Nancy=Ann(e). You need to be sure why Agnes' daughter named a child (who was not her first daughter) Anne, but appears not to have named a daughter Agnes, which was the well documented given name of her mother.

Could they, for instance, have had an older daughter named Agnes whose baptism is not in the surviving records? I don't see a marriage record to see whether there was a gap between the marriage and the arrival of Duncan in 1798.

And why did Margaret Campbell not name one of her sons Neil after her brother?

On the other hand the presence of a Sophia among Agnes McKoel's daughters and another Sophia among her granddaughters is potentially a useful connection.

Thanks, Kay99.

wyanga, if this is correct, Margaret Campbell or McKellar cannot be the one baptised in Lochgoilhead in 1775, because Lochgoilhead is a separate parish from the parish of Dunoon and Kilmun. So don't hasten up that tree until you have some proper evidence that it's the right tree.

Just because there is only one candidate in the available records does not mean that they are the right one. There are many gaps in the records before the start of civil registration in 1855, and the further back you go, the more records, if they ever existed, have not survived.

I see that Duncan McKellar and Margaret Campbell had a large family; Catherine 1801, Hellen 1802; Anne 1804; Peter 1806; John 1808; Margaret 1810; James 1812; Archibald 1815; Mary 1816; Sophia 1819 and Donald 1822. No Agnes, as you would have expected if Margaret's mother's name was Agnes or Nancy; though it is true that the names Anne and Agnes are sometimes used interchangeably.

If I were you I would have a look at the baptisms to see if the names of witnesses are recorded, and if so, whether they contain any clues to the identities of the grandparents.

My thoughts on this are that there were Census collectors who wrote down what they thought they heard the individual say, speech and accent could very well have made Wigtown sound like Wigton.

At that date, I wouldn't give even a passing thought to spelling.

But that doesn't alter the fact that it is not in Dumfrieshire. He was at that time an old man and maybe was confused in his thinking.

Possibly, or maybe it was an enumerator's error.

in the 1861 Census, she had also reverted to her maiden name of McKellar

It's very common in the early censuses for a married or widowed woman to be recorded under her own maiden surname. This is because in Scots law a woman does not lose her maiden surname when she marries. It's for the same reason that you get the mother's maiden surname in the majority of baptism records, and in all post-1855 birth, marriage and death records. In legal documents a married woman is named as xxx yyy or zzz, xxx being her given name(s), yyy her maiden surname and zzz her husband's surname.