Exploring the Scottish homeland of Trump's mother ++REPLAY++

(11 Jul 2018) LEAD IN:
Donald Trump is about to make a three-day state visit to the UK.
The President and First Lady Melania Trump will be the guests of the Queen.
Trump is used to a life of glamour and power, but he has humble roots on a remote windswept island off the west coast of Scotland.

STORY-LINE:
It's here, on the remote sheep farming Isle of Lewis, a two hour ferry trip off the west coast of Scotland, that Donald Trump's mother was born.
Mary Anne MacLeod and her nine siblings lived a pious, rural life in a humble house in the small village of Tong (pronounced Tongue).
The church, which still plays a significant role in the life of the islanders, was a major force in the early 1900s and every Sunday,  Mary Anne and her family would dress up and walk four miles from Tong to the town of Stornoway to worship.
John Cunningham, a clerk in the High Church of Scotland in Stornaway, says Marry Anne and all her siblings were baptised in the church.
"Mary Anne MacLeod was born in 1912. She was baptised in this church in August 1913. She came from the village of Tong, which is about 4 miles out of Stornoway. So, Mary Anne's family would have walked that distance to church every Sunday. Worship in this place would have been exclusively in the Gaelic language at that time. It has since moved to English with a Gaelic provision next door in the smaller sanctuary, but at that time all worship would have been in Gaelic."
Records show that one of Mary Anne's brothers, baptised in 1903, was named Donald, a name she would later give her son, the future President of the United States.
MacLeod emmigrated to New York in 1930 and went on to meet and marry Frederick Trump. Cunningham says despite entering a world of opulence she never lost touch with her roots and returned regularly to church.
"Mary Anne later in life, she would return here most years on holiday to the family home and she would come to worship here in the church. Now, as a young girl the family would be sitting upstairs on the balcony, but as she came back later in life – she would sit in the centre of the church - just in these pews here, and she was very much the centre of attention when she came. She would interact with everybody in Gaelic and English – well known to the congregation at that time. Donald Trump himself has been here. Donald Trump himself has been here a number of years ago. He just passed through. He visited for a day, but he didn't view the church. He was just at the family home in Tong on his way through to Aberdeen."
The main MacLeod guesthouse at Trump International Gold Links is named after his mother's family. The Saltire, the Scottish flag, flies at the clubhouse.
The exclusive golf course is a long way from his mother's humble beginnings on the Isle of Lewis, where his ancestors would have relied on fishing and crofting to survive.
James Maciver, a minister at the Stornaway Free Church, grew up in Tong and remembers his father talking about Mary Anne MacLeod and how she found success in the United States.
"My father was born in 1914. So that was just really shortly before Mary Anne (Trump) went to America, but certainly he would know the family and would speak about the way that she had married into the Trump family and the organisation that became the Trump organisation. What I remember… comments about it, were that she had done very well as somebody who had left the island during a time of economic difficulties. And through this had actually done very well for herself."
President Trump is making a three day state visit to the UK 3-5 June 2019.

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