ISLE OF LEWIS, Scotland — On a windswept island 40 miles off Scotland's northwest coast, a 19th century castle turned museum echoes with Gaelic ballads about homesickness and loss.
For centuries, islanders lined fishing docks below the castle, waving handkerchiefs at ships setting sail for America. Generations of locals left hardscrabble poverty on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, for opportunities abroad.
Among them, in the early 20th century, were all 10 children of a local sub-postmaster, Malcolm MacLeod, and his wife Mary — including their youngest, Mary Anne MacLeod, born in 1912.
She became the mother of Donald Trump.
When President Trump arrives in the United Kingdom on Tuesday for a state visit at Windsor Castle, hosted by King Charles III, he'll also be arriving in his mother's homeland — a place where his maternal family roots go back centuries.
Trump's mother was an immigrant, a native Gaelic speaker who learned English as a second language. She and her siblings were part of a phenomenon of family-based migration to the United States, which American immigration hardliners have deemed "chain migration" — and her son's administration has sought to stop.
A place more accustomed to departures than arrivals
Even in the era of modern air travel, the Isle of Lewis isn't easy to reach.
When NPR visited in August, via a tiny commercial flight from Glasgow, the pilot got on the PA system to warn that a nasty haar — a Scottish sea fog — might imperil our trip. We had to circle the island several times before attempting to land — the only flight able to do so that day.
It's a stunning place, sparsely forested, coated with farmland and peat bogs, cut with jagged ravines and lined with a ribbon of white sand lapped by frigid turquoise waters. At its tip, the North Atlantic meets the Norwegian Sea, as you look north toward the Arctic.
It's a place more accustomed to people leaving than arriving. Local culture is infused with goodbyes, says archivist Seonaid McDonald, who helped curate an exhibit at Lews Castle about emigration from the island.
"From the late 18th century, people began to leave in larger numbers. There was also a severe potato famine here as well as in Ireland in the 1840s," she explains. "Although they were leaving for reasons of trying to improve themselves, they had a terrible sense of homesickness." Most went to Canada or the U.S., even more than to mainland Scotland, she says.
She chokes up, pointing to a museum display with black and white photos of islanders waving goodbye from a dock to loved ones on the deck of a ship.
"The people who left were very poor," she says. "They might be [abroad] for decades before they could come back to visit — by which time, their parents would have died."
Even today, "a large proportion of people here have an empathy for those that have to flee their homelands for different reasons, whether it's oppression, poverty, war," McDonald says.
The house where Mary Anne MacLeod grew up
The biggest town on the Isle of Lewis, and in the entire Outer Hebrides chain, is Stornoway — population around 7,000. Mary Anne MacLeod grew up in a suburb, a village called Tong — really just a cluster of houses, including the early 20th century squat gray stucco bungalow that was her family's home.
Locals call it a "white house." But that's not a reference to her son's current residence in Washington. It's in contrast to "blackhouses," traditional thatched-roof dwellings that housed both people and their livestock, and were the norm in the Outer Hebrides until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The name comes from how their interior walls were blackened from burning peat.
MacLeod's father Malcolm ran a post office out of an annex on their modern house.
"Because he ran the post office, telegrams, letters, parcels, clothes and money would have come in from across the globe. So the little house [Mary Anne] lived in was the global crossroads for the village," says Torcuil Crichton, a member of the center-left ruling Labour Party who represents the Outer Hebrides in the U.K. Parliament. It's the country's smallest constituency. His own mother also grew up in Tong.
Exposure to the outside world, through her father's work, must have whetted MacLeod's appetite for travel, Crichton says.
Her prospects on the island were also limited: There was little work for women besides gutting herring. Many of the area's eligible bachelors had been killed or wounded in World War I. Hundreds died in a mass drowning incident that followed.
From Scotland, a "rags to riches" trajectory
In the mid-1920s, a teenaged MacLeod followed her older sisters to New York City. She may have worked initially as a maid or nanny, as many immigrant women did in that era, says Calum Angus Mackay, who made a Gaelic TV documentary about MacLeod, based on letters she sent to a lifelong pen pal in Dundee, on the Scottish mainland.
"It is primarily a rags to riches [story]!" Mackay says. "Mary Anne basically left with a ... bag under her arm, and very little money."
In 1929, when the U.S. stock market crashed, she returned to Scotland. But by then she'd met a real estate developer named Fred Trump — who convinced her, in letters, to return to New York and marry him, which she did in 1936.
From then on, the photos she sent home showed a woman transformed, says Crichton, who also reviewed MacLeod's pen pal correspondence and collaborated with Mackay on the Gaelic documentary.
"There's one [photo], on the steps of an upstate New York swimming pool, where she's wearing a bathing costume, her hair is now dyed blonde, and she looks like she's walked out of the pages of The Great Gatsby or a Hollywood movie," Crichton says. "It's the story of the old world and the new world, and really it's the story of 20th century America."
Many MacLeods
On the Isle of Lewis, the MacLeod clan goes back to the Middle Ages. It's still one of the most common surnames on the island. Their signature tartan plaid is yellow and black.
A volunteer at the Stornoway Historical Society, Catherine MacLeod, explains how she didn't need to change her name when she got married; her maiden and married names were both MacLeod.
"In high school, on the very first day, we were put in alphabetical order, and you would have A to L, and [then just the] M's. Because you have all the McDonalds, McKenzies, and then MacLeods with the same name!" says Anna Tucker, another volunteer. "You'd have Donald MacLeod A, Donald MacLeod B and often even a Donald MacLeod C."
Tucker's maiden name was MacLeod, and so was her mother's. Both of her grandfathers were named Angus MacLeod, she says.
"We have hundreds and hundreds of visitors from the States and Canada coming every year, looking for their ancestors," Tucker says. "And it's confusing to figure out which MacLeod branch to tell them!"
In a cemetery in the hamlet of Gress, the closest burial place to where Trump's mother grew up, more than half of the headstones bear the MacLeod family name.
Local parliamentarian invites Trump back
One of Trump's cousins still lives in the bungalow where the president's mother grew up. But there's no plaque or sign, and the cousin didn't want to talk with NPR.
Signs in one shop window in Stornoway say "Shame on you, Donald John!"
Public opinion is divided over Trump, Mackay says, but locals are proud of his mother's trajectory.
Last winter after Trump was reelected, Crichton, the local member of Parliament, sent a holiday card to the White House — from one politician to another, across the aisle, from the old world to the new one, he says — inviting Trump back for a visit.
"If he came home, he'd see his mother's story, and the hard work, actually! The determination that made America great," Crichton says. "And it's still going on! It's coming from different parts of the world. But isn't that the story of America? How beautifully and fantastically it renews itself all the time."
MacLeod, after becoming a U.S. citizen and Mrs. Fred Trump, came home many times over the years, showering neighbors with gifts, sitting in the family pew at church and slipping back into her native Gaelic language — as if she'd never left, locals say.
As a child, Donald Trump joined her at least once. In 2008, he returned with his oldest sister Maryanne and visited that bungalow — staying inside for just 97 seconds, according to media reports at the time.
He's been to Scotland many times since then, but apparently never again to his mother's home island. When Trump arrives in the U.K. Tuesday, he's expected to stay in England, visiting Windsor Castle and Prime Minister Keir Starmer's country retreat Chequers, outside London.
Crichton says his invitation to the Isle of Lewis still stands, but he doesn't think the U.S. president will take him up on it.
"Because to acknowledge his mother's story of chain migration, which is the kind of — let's face it — the kind of woman he wants to stop coming into America right now, I think to acknowledge that would be to kind of go against lots of his own policies and beliefs," he says.
Mary Anne MacLeod died in the summer of 2000, aged 88, without seeing her son reach the White House. But at Trump's first inauguration, in 2017, he swore the oath of office on a Bible from the Isle of Lewis — given to him by his mother.
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