Family name origins & meanings
- Scottish : Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac Gille Bhràtha, a patronymic from a personal name meaning ‘servant of judgment’.
- The leading negotiator between the Creek nation and the U.S. government in the years after the American Revolution was a Creek chief who bore the unlikely name Alexander McGillivray (b. c.1759). He was in fact of mixed descent; his father was Lachlan McGillivray, a Scottish trader, but he owed his position in the Creek nation to matrilineal descent through his mother, who was half Creek and half French.
