Welcome to another deep dive. We are really glad
you are here with us today. Yeah. Because today
we are looking at a family tree that is honestly.
It's quite frankly staggering. It's completely
wild. It is. We have a lineage here that spans
all the way from the year 2050 BC straight through
to the modern era. We're talking about this rich,
chaotic history filled with cursed castles. A
relative who literally invented steam -powered
bagpipes back in 1767. Which sounds incredibly
dangerous, by the way. Oh, completely. And there's
even an ancestor who gave away all of his wealth
and then somehow ate himself to death in a king's
pantry. It's this... epic saga of triumph, betrayal,
and just this legendary, almost pathological
cheapness. Right. But here is the massive twist
to all of this. Right. This family isn't real.
They are entirely fictional cartoon ducks. It
sounds completely absurd when you lay it out
like that, I know, but every single detail you
just mentioned is entirely true to the lore.
Yeah, so today's deep dive is sourced entirely
from an extensive, incredibly detailed Wikipedia
article that covers the history, the origins,
and the massive family tree of the clan McDuck.
The one and only. Exactly. And our mission today
is to sift through decades of complex, occasionally
contradictory comic book lore. We want to uncover
the surprisingly rich, meticulously crafted and
often hilarious fictional history of Scrooge
McDuck's Scottish ancestors. OK, so let's unpack
this because I am just marveling at the fact
that a comic book character who famously swims
in a giant bin of gold coins. Right. The classic
image. Yeah. That he has a more detailed, robust
lineage than most actual real world historical
figures. It genuinely rivals the genealogies
of real European royalty. And I think it's important
to establish right away for you listening that
this isn't just about fun comic book trivia.
Definitely not. What we are really looking at
here is a masterclass in world building. It's
narrative continuity that has been stretched,
debated, and refined over half a century. You
have multiple authors and artists working across
different decades and even different continents,
all contributing to a single, surprisingly cohesive
family history. It's wild. It really is an incredibly
unique literary achievement when you step back
and look at the whole picture. So to understand
how we even got this massive family tree, we
have to look at the architects of the clan. The
real world creators. And it all starts with the
legendary comic book author Carl Barks. The foundation
of it all. Right. Barks first created the concept
of Clam McDuck back in a 1948 story called The
Old Castle Secret. But here's the funny part
about that origin. In the early 1950s, Barks
wasn't trying to build some massive cinematic
universe. No, not at all. He was literally just
trying to figure out the relationships between
Donald Duck, Scrooge McDuck, and Gladstone Gander
for his own personal reference. He sketched out
a rough family tree just to keep his own story
straight in his head. Exactly. It was purely
a utilitarian tool for the writer. But that private
internal reference sheet became the foundation
for something monumental. And that brings us
to the second architect of this family, Don Rosa.
Oh, Rosa's fascinating. What's fascinating here
is that Rosa was actually a longtime fan of Karl
Barks, who eventually transitioned into writing
and drawing for the comics himself. In the early
1990s, the publisher, the Egmont Group, gave
Rosa this incredibly ambitious, almost impossible
assignment. Basically a nightmare assignment.
Basically, yeah. They essentially said, we have
decades of stories floating around with all these
narrative contradictions about Scrooge's past.
We need you to fix it. We need you to create
the definitive biography. I mean, imagine your
boss dropping 50 years of contradictory files
on your desk and saying, hey, make all of this
make perfect sense. It's a huge undertaking.
And the way Rosa approached this is nothing short
of obsessive. He scoured every single one of
Barks' old stories looking for any tiny clue
about Scrooge's past. If Barks mentioned a name
in passing or made an offhand comment about a
date, or threw in a historical reference for
a quick joke, Rosa logged it. He was meticulous.
He actually dubbed these clues Barksian facts.
He treated the original comic strips like historical
primary sources. Which is a brilliant way to
approach world building. He took all these disparate
throwaway facts and wove them together into a
massive 12 -part comic saga called The Life and
Times of Scrooge McDuck. He essentially built
the connective tissue between decades of random
jokes. And he did it with such reverence. I was
really struck by the humility Rosa showed in
the sources. In the introduction to his massive
work, he explicitly stated that this was just
his personal telling of Scrooge's life. Right.
He didn't want to step on anyone's toes. Exactly.
He didn't want it to be a strict mandate that
handcuffed future writers. He was simply trying
to honor the original creator, Karl Barks, by
making sense of the world Barks left behind.
That level of respect for the source material
is rare. Rosa wasn't trying to overwrite Barks.
He was trying to elevate him. Rosa mapped all
this out, everything physically anchored around
one deeply cursed location. Macduck Castle. The
family seat. A very important location. Very.
This place is located in Dismal Downs, somewhere
in Rannoch Moor, which is actually a real moorland
area in north -central Scotland. According to
the foundational lore, the Macduck clan was run
out of this castle in 1675 by a monstrous devil
dog. Which sounds... Utterly terrifying. You
picture this Hound of the Baskerville situation
until you read further and find out it was actually
just an elaborate plot by their bitter rivals,
Clan Whiskerville, to scare them off the land.
The Whiskervilles essentially pulled a Scooby
-Doo villain plot in the 17th century. Yes, exactly
that. But the castle's history gets even more
complicated depending on which continuity you
look at. If we look at the lore established in
the DuckTales universe, there's a brilliant piece
of conflicting history regarding exactly why
the castle is cursed. Oh, this is my favorite
part. According to this version, Scrooge's great
-great -grandfather, Silas McDuck, decided to
build the family castle. But to save money on
construction costs, he incorporated the castle
directly into an existing druid stone circle.
Wait, so he essentially hijacked a sacred ancient
monument just to save on foundation costs. Precisely.
He used it as a discount retaining wall. That
is amazing. And the Druids, understandably furious
about their sacred site being co -opted by a
cheap Scottish lord, sought revenge. They were
the ones who trained phosphorescent hounds to
scare the clan away. So this terrifying supernatural
legend that ruined the family's reputation in
the 1600s is ultimately just the delayed consequence
of a... terrible penny -pinching real estate
decision. I love how that entirely recontextualizes
the myth. And the modern 2017 DuckTales series
takes that theme and pushes it even further.
It really does. In that continuity, Scrooge actually
goes back to rebuild the castle to give his parents
a home. Yeah. But being true to his nature, Scrooge
decides to use discount druid stones for the
rebuild. Of course he does. Right. And by using
cheap, presumably defective magical stones, he
accidentally curses his own parents with immortality
and binds them to a castle that only appears
in our dimension once every five years. It's
a phenomenal narrative device. The fatal flaw
of the protagonist, his obsessive need to save
a buck, is written into the very DNA of his ancestors
and the literal stone of his ancestral home.
The McDuck's legendary cheapness is constantly,
without fail, causing them magical and historical
grief. Speaking of historical grief, we really
need to dive into the Dark Ages. When you look
at the chronological timeline of this family
tree, It is a masterclass in losing a fortune.
It really is. It perfectly illustrates how this
clan used to be incredibly wealthy and influential,
but lost it all through sheer stubbornness and
incredibly bad decisions. Self -sabotage at its
finest. Exactly. If you've ever had a boss who
refused to buy office supplies just to save a
few pennies, you are going to deeply relate to
the serfs of Sir Ider McDuck. He lived from 880
to 946. A very tough time to be a serf. To say
the least. He was the chief of the clan during
an Anglo -Saxon siege. And he was killed during
that siege because his own serfs completely abandoned
him. Why did they abandon him? Because he refused
to buy them arrows. He thought arrows were an
unnecessary expense. Plus, he was only paying
his serfs 30 copper pieces an hour. to risk their
lives a catastrophic failure of medieval middle
management you can't really blame the serfs for
walking away not at all yeah and you see that
same financial paranoia later with sir quackley
mcduck around the year 1010 king macbeth actually
tasked him with protecting a royal treasure chest
in exchange for his support in a war A high honor.
Right. And Sir Quackley agreed. But he became
so intensely paranoid about someone stealing
the treasure that he walled himself inside the
castle with it. He literally entombed himself
by accident because he couldn't trust anyone
near the gold. He essentially became a prisoner
of his own horde, which is a very heavy metaphor
for the McDuck family as a whole. And then we
have Sir Murdoch, who died in 1066. This is one
of the funniest historical integrations in the
lore. Oh, this one is great. Murdoch was a businessman
who actually patented the longbow. In 1066, when
the Normans invaded England, Murdoch saw an opportunity
and sold them his longos, a great, albeit treasonous,
business deal. But he couldn't just leave well
enough alone. No, he couldn't. The Normans ended
up not having enough arrows for their new longbows
because Murdoch decided to charge them extra
for the ammunition. They simply couldn't afford
his upcharge. Classic McDuck. He sabotaged his
own lucrative military contract and potentially
altered the course of the Norman conquest, all
for a slightly higher profit margin on arrows.
It is just relentless self -sabotage. And we
cannot gloss over Sir Roast and Sir Swampole.
No, we definitely cared. Sir Roast inherited
one of the richest clans in - all of Scotland.
But in 1189, he offered a massive portion of
the clan's wealth to the king of Scotland to
help pay a tribute. It was supposed to be this
grand patriotic gesture, but it completely ruined
the clan financially. They were destitute. And
it didn't even buy him a good legacy. No. Adding
insult to injury, Saros wasn't remembered as
a hero. He was remembered for his gluttony. After
giving away the family fortune, he raided the
king's pantry and literally ate himself to death.
Leaving his successor, Swamp Hole McDuck, to
inherit absolute financial ruin. And what does
Swamp Hole do? He immediately seals the castle
dungeons. He tells everyone it's to decrease
maintenance costs. Right. Though later comic
lore hints he was actually hiding a secret treasure
down there. Exactly. But again, the public excuse
is always about saving money. I think my absolute
favorite ancient ancestor might be Black Donald
McDuck from 1440. He was nicknamed Black Donald
purely because he had such a notoriously foul
temper. According to the clan's lore, Black Donald
supposedly invented golf, the hammer throw, and
the caper toss. Quite the athlete. But his temper
while playing golf was so legendary and so incredibly
volatile that King James II of Scotland actually
had the sport of golf outlawed. Just picture
the sheer magnitude of a tantrum required to
make a reigning monarch ban a sport for an entire
nation. It's brilliant comedic writing, but it
also establishes a very important genetic trait
for the family. Explosive, uncontainable rage.
As we move forward through the timeline, you
see that temper get passed down quite clearly
through the generations, just as prominently
as their cheapness. Which brings us perfectly
to the seafarers and the early modern McDucks.
When we hit the 1500s, we meet Malcolm Mady McDuck.
He served as the first mate on an English frigate
called the HMS Falcon Rover. And there's a fantastic
little Easter egg buried in the sources here.
Oh, yes. The bosun on that same pirate raiding
ship was a character named Pintail Duck, meaning
that the McDuck family and the Duck family actually
crossed paths and worked together centuries before
Donald Duck's parents were even born. It really
shows how Rosa and the other writers were determined
to weave these separate comic lineages together
into a cohesive universe. If we connect this
to the bigger picture as we look at these early
modern ancestors, their lives really start to
mirror Scrooge's own modern struggles. Take Captain
Hugh Seafoam McDuck, who lived from 1710 to 1776.
Seafoam had a rough go of it. He really did.
Seafoam was actually a successful merchant. He
had his own ship, the Golden Goose. But he made
the mistake of signing a contract with a notorious
swimmer. named Swindle McSue to deliver a massive
shipment of horseradish to Jamaica. Which is
a very specific cargo. Very specific. And McSue
intentionally sabotaged the ship. The golden
goose sank, and Seafoam learned the hard way
about the danger of fine print. The fine print
always gets them. Always. The contract stipulated
that if the delivery failed, Seafoam forfeited
all his worldly possessions to McSue. Seafoam
lost absolutely everything. The lore states he
escaped with nothing but the clothes on his back,
a silver pocket watch, and the golden dentures
in his mouth. The golden dentures. The visual
comedy of a duck with golden dentures is great.
but the story itself is actually quite tragic.
He was utterly ruined by trusting the wrong person.
It is a tragedy, and it's a tragedy that profoundly
informs the future of the entire family. Think
about how Seafoam's story imprints on the Klan's
psychology. It becomes a generational cautionary
tale about the absolute devastation of fine print,
the inherent danger of trusting business partners,
and the catastrophic overnight loss of wealth.
And that leads us directly into the immediate
family, the modern generations, where things
get deeply personal for Scrooge. We start with
his grandparents, Dirty Dingus McDuck, who worked
his life as a coal miner, and his wife, Molly
Mallard. They had a very interesting son. They
did. They had a son named Angus Pothole McDuck,
who feels like he walks straight out of an American
folklore legend. Angus survived the sinking of
a Mississippi riverboat called the Drennan White.
He decided to become a riverboater himself and
ended up in this insane rivalry with a guy named
Porker Hog. The names in these comics are just
spectacular. They really are. Porker Hog. So
Angus and Porker Hog literally raced their riverboats
to win the deed to a bankrupt southern plantation
called Corn Pone Gables. But they pushed their
boilers too hard and both of their boats sink
during the race. Just a total disaster. Right.
So Angus, completely unfazed by losing his boat,
just... Pivots. Yeah. He spends the next 10 years
as a professional card player, wins another boat
in a card game, and eventually retires. And how
does he spend his retirement? This is the best
part. Writing highly exaggerated dime novels
about his own life while touring the country
with Buffalo Bill, P .T. Barnum, and Annie Oakley.
Angus represents the quintessential American
frontier tall tale seamlessly grafted onto the
Scottish McDuck family tree. But the true emotional
core of this entire mythology really rests with
Scrooge's parents, Fergus McDuck and Downey O'Drake.
Fergus is such a complex character. He is. Fergus
was a mill worker in Glasgow, living in relative
poverty. But he recognized Scrooge's intense
ambition very early on. Yeah, I was reading the
section in the sources about Scrooge's famous
number one dime, the very first coin he ever
earned, the one he keeps on a velvet pillow under
a glass case. And I'm still wrapping my head
around the twist with Fergus. It changes everything.
It really does. Because the traditional narrative
we all know is that a young Scrooge was shining
shoes in Glasgow and someone paid... him with
an american dime he was cheated because he couldn't
spend foreign currency in scotland and that unfairness
is what drove him to be sharp and tough right
the surface level story is that the world is
inherently cruel and you have to be ready for
it but the sources reveal a completely different
hidden layer to that origin exactly it turns
out it wasn't an accident at all the lore reveals
that it was actually fergus scrooge's own father
who orchestrated the entire thing Fergus secretly
gave a local ditch digger that specific American
dime and told the man to use it to pay his son
for a shoeshine. Fergus intentionally set his
son up to be cheated. Which sounds incredibly
harsh at first glance. It does. Like, what kind
of father does that? But the motivation behind
it completely redefines their relationship. How
so? Fergus didn't do it to be cruel. He did it
to give his son the ultimate gift of self -reliance.
He wanted Scrooge to feel the sting of a hard
lesson in a safe environment so he would learn
to be sharp, to be tough, and to make his own
way in a world that wasn't going to hand him
anything. So what does this all mean? It entirely
recontextualizes Scrooge's primary motivation.
He isn't just driven by anger at the world. He
is driven by a profound, hidden lesson from his
father. And Fergus actually took this parenting
philosophy even further. Oh, with his secret
treasure? Yes. fergus knew a massive secret about
mcduck castle he knew that there was a vast knights
templar treasure hidden deep within the castle
dungeons dating back to an ancestor named simon
mcduck who had been the treasurer for the templars
but fergus absolutely refused to tell scrooge
about this hidden wealth he sat on a literal
fortune while living in poverty he took the secret
of the templar gold to his grave And he did it
because he intimately understood his son's psychology.
He knew that Scrooge would feel vastly more fulfilled
and become a much stronger, more capable person
by building his own fortune from nothing, rather
than simply inheriting a pile of ancient gold.
Fergus prioritized his son's character over their
immediate financial comfort. That is just phenomenal
character writing for a comic book. It gives
so much depth to their dynamic. And we definitely
can't talk about Scrooge's immediate family without
talking about his sisters, Matilda and Hortense.
They are crucial to the Empire. Very different
personalities, though. Extremely different. Matilda
is the calm, grounded one. While Scrooge was
out traveling the globe, diving into volcanoes
and exploring jungles to expand his financial
empire, Matilda was the one back home actually
running the day -to -day corporate operations
from 1902 to 1930. She kept the lights on. Someone
had to do the paperwork. Right. But Hortense,
Hortense is an absolute spitfire. She makes Black
Donald and his golf -banning temper look perfectly
calm. Hortense is a localized force of nature.
My favorite anecdote from the entire source text
is about Hortense at Kilmotor Hill. According
to the lore, she single -handedly caused the
entire United States military to flee the hill.
She was armed with nothing but a broom and her
incredibly bad temper, and she actually terrified
President Theodore Roosevelt. It's a hilarious
visual. Imagine a single cartoon duck routing
the U .S. Army with a broom. But this isn't just
a funny character quirk. It has massive implications
for the broader Disney universe. Hortense McDuck
ends up marrying a character named Quackmore
Duck. Together, they are Donald Duck's parents.
Oh, wow. Yeah. So when you read about Hortense
terrifying the U .S. military, it perfectly explains
exactly where Donald gets his legendary explosive
rage. It isn't just random cartoon anger. It's
genetic. It traces back from Donald to Hortense
all the way back to Black Donald getting golf
banned in the 1400s. The narrative continuity
across centuries is seamless. It makes total
sense when you realize they charted it all out
like that. Before we wrap up The Family Tree,
the sources do touch upon a few of the oddball
relatives, which I think just shows how sprawling
and internationally collaborative this intellectual
property became over the decades. Different cultures
added their own flavor to the clan. Like Gideon?
Yes, for instance, there's Gideon McDuck, who
was created specifically for the Italian comic
stories. He's this highly moralistic newspaper
editor who actually acts as a foil and an antagonist
to Scrooge. He runs a paper called The County
Conscience. Right, using family to challenge
Scrooge's business ethic. Exactly. Then there's
Rumpus McFowell, a wildly lazy half -brother
who just tries to sponge off Scrooge's immense
wealth. And Douglas McDuck, a cousin who looks
exactly like Scrooge and is just as cheap as
Scrooge, but has absolutely terrible luck. He
spends his entire life out in mining country,
desperately searching for fool's gold. These
spinoff characters really highlight how different
writers utilize the McDuck archetype. They took
the core familial traits, greed, morality, stubbornness,
cheapness, and refracted them into new characters
to challenge Scrooge in different ways. It's
brilliant. But if we synthesize this entire deep
dive, the big takeaway for me is how this fictional
family tree serves as a masterclass in character
motivation. When you understand the full history
of Clan McDuck, you realize that Scrooge isn't
just greedy. for the sake of being greedy, he
is driven by profound generational trauma. Think
about everything we've discussed. He comes from
a family that repeatedly lost immense wealth
and their ancestral home to swindlers, to their
own bad tempers, and to their literal cheapness.
His obsession with holding onto his money, with
swimming in it so he knows it's still there,
is a direct psychological response to centuries
of his ancestors losing theirs. That is such
a fascinating, empathetic way to look at it.
It completely grounds this cartoon duck in very
real human psychology. And I want you listening.
to this right now to think about your own family
tree for a moment. Yeah, reflect on that. Think
about how your own family stories, the wild,
exaggerated tall tales from an uncle, the cautionary
financial tales about a great grandparent, the
unexpected triumphs, how do those stories shape
your personal ambitions? We all have our own
version of the McDuck clan history echoing in
our heads, influencing how we handle our careers,
our money, and our relationships. We absolutely
do. The past always informs the present, whether
we actively realize it or not. The stories we
inherit become the operating systems for our
own lives. Exactly. So I want to leave you with
a final provocative thought to mull over on your
own today. Let's hear it. If a team of incredibly
dedicated comic book writers were to dig through
your family history right now and define your
unique set of Barksian facts, what bizarre ancestral
traits would they say explain exactly who you
are today? That is a brilliant question to ponder.
Thanks for joining us for this deep dive. Keep
asking questions, keep digging into the lore
of your own life, and we'll see you next time.