THE MOVE FROM FRANCE & CONCLUSION

We need only to look at France in the 1600s to see a possible reason why our ancestors made the move from France. This was a time of much trouble in France, for we have Religious persecution on a large scale, between the Catholics and Protestants. France was a Catholic country, but had a sizeable Protestant population, unfortunately tensions rose between them and the Catholics started to persecute the Protestants. Vast numbers of Protestants left France over a number of years, many more weren't so lucky and paid the ultimate price for their religious beliefs.

It is believed that around about 500,000 French Protestants were forced to flee during the persecution, we now know them as the Huguenots. The safest place to flee too would have been to Britain, which was a Protestant country, so you could expect at least sanctuary there. England is known to have taken vast numbers of these refugees, while others came to Scotland and Ireland. So we now have a reason for a move from France and it is within the time frame of our first mention in Scotland, putting this and all the other things, which I have talked about I can put forward this possible theory.

We could have been French Protestants who came to Scotland to escape the persecution. When we arrived here we could have been giving the closest sounding English language equivalent of our original French name, the name of Motion.

Of course I know that this theory presents no concrete proof concerning the Scottish Motions, however looking at the evidence which I have found concerning the Quebec and German Motions I feel that there is now a strong possibility that they and the Scottish Motions are linked in some way. With the name of Motion being nothing more than a variant in Quebec, the same thing could well have happened in Scotland, except in reverse to that of Quebec. Motion is the name in which we were called by and it just stayed with us through the ages, whereas in Quebec the name reverted back to its original French spelling.

JAMES MOTION

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