Morgan Douglas Maclachlan was born January 28, 1940, in Gainesville, Florida. His parents Sociology profs at the University of Florida. He was the middle of 3 brothers: older brother Bruce lives in Atlanta; and younger brother Alan passed away in 2015. He has 3 children and 4 grandchildren.

He attended the University of Florida for his Bachelor of Arts degree. While there he also attended the National Science Foundation sponsored program in social statistics at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

In 1962 entered Stanford PhD program on a National Institute of Health fellowship in Anthropology. While a Stanford student he did ethnographic field research on the Blackfoot Reservation (1963) and in a village in South India (1965-66). In 1967 he joined the faculty of the University of Texas Austin, where he met Mary. In 1972 they moved to Columbia and he joined the USC faculty. His publications include books, Why They Did Not Starve (1983) and Household Economies and Their Transformations (ed.1985). In 1989 he co-authored an article awarded the Morton Fried Prize as the best article in the American Anthropologist for that year.
In 2000 he retired as Distinguished Professor Emeritus and took up the study of musicology and composition. One of his choral pieces was performed at the convention of the Society of Composers (2010) another was performed at the UU Musicians Network convention in 2013. We continue to enjoy his compositions here at UUCC.