While I was researching the Stevenson Family Tree, I came across the article below, describing the beginnings of the Stevenson name.

The Stevenson Family “according to tradition (is) one (of) the proscribed of the clan MACGREGOR of Glenorchy, who was born among the willows in a hill-side sheep pen - ‘Son of my Love’. The heir of MACGREGOR of Glenorchy + post 1353, murdered about 1353 by the Argyll Campbells, appears to have been the original “Son of my Love’; and his more loyal clanmen took the name to fight under. It may be supposed the story of their resistance became popular, and the name in some sort identifies with the ideas of opposition to the Campbells.

“Twice afterwards, on some renewed aggression, in 1502 and 1552, we find the clan MACGREGOR of Glenorchy again banding themselves into a Sept of the ‘Son of my Love’. When the great disaster fell on them in 1603 the whole original legend re-appears, and we have the heir of Alister of Glenstrae born ‘among the willow’ of a fugitive mother, and the more loyal clanmen again rallying under the name STEVENSON.

“A story would not be told so often unless it had some basis in fact; nor - if there were no bond at all between the “Red” MacGregors and the Stevensons - would that extraneous and somewhat uncouth name be so much repeated in the Legends of the Children of the Mist.

“Doubtless a proscribed clan could not be particular; they took a name as a man takes an umbrella against a shower; as Robert (Rob Roy) MACGREGOR 1671-1734 took Campbell, and his son took Drummond. But this case is different; a Stevenson was not taken and left - it was consistently adhered to. I does not in the least follow that all Stevenson are of the clan Alpin; but is does follow that some may be”.

Robert Louis Stevenson 1850-1894 (R.S.L.) writing about this family, the Family here treated, thus comes to this conclusion: “I cannot conceal from myself the possibility that Nathanial Stevenson 1732-1824, my first authentic ancestor, may (therefore) have had a Highland alias upon his conscience and a claymore in his back garden”.

“I am bound up and in my forebears”, R.S.L. has written. for him, as for his relations before and since, the authenticity of their Stevenson Ancestry underwrites this Stevenson Family’s claim to be numbered among the elect, Children of the Mist, Masters of the Imagination”, both in the Arts and in the Sciences where they continue to flourish.

Claims of a relationship to the Stevensons have therefore been numerous. To a family conditions so much by the “Myth of Heredity”’ Family Records continue to be carefully kept, on guarding the family from “Pretenders”.

cited from the following Internet address: http://www.links.org/links-cgi/family?ho...s-data+camilla-stevensn+218031+5-10-0-1-0