RootsChat.Com

To AlKar in particular

This is my first post as I have just started to become interested in the history of the Alcorn Family of Horn Head Co Donegal.  William Alcorn and Margaret Doel are my Great-great-grandparents.  Some oral history that we recorded (a few years ago) had her name as 'Duall' but I do not want to start a new thread about this and am happy to go with Doel or Doyle or Dowell.  I hope that the information that follows is not old news to this thread and I must stress that what follows is oral history that I picked up which I have not been able to substantiate with any records.

The information I have (and it may well be apocryphal) is that William Alcorn was the only son of a family of 10.  It appears  that he had two older sisters Johanna and Frances and seven younger sisters whose names are not known.

The second part of the story is that William was ostracised from his family for marrying Margaret.  Once again I stress that this is apocryphal.  The story is that  Margaret was "the tidewatcher's daughter" or "the tidekeeper's daughter". The tidekeeper was employed by the landlord on that part of Horn Head (Stewart I believe) to look out for flotsam that would wash up on the beach to which he was entitled as the landlord.  This deprived the tenants of the land of an extra  source of income and/or goods, therefore the "tidekeeper" or "tidewatcher" was an unpopular figure in the neighbourhood.

The story goes that when William and Margaret married they left the family home at Lower Claggan and moved to upper Claggan, to what would appear to be the land occupied by William Alcorn at the time of the 1857 Griffith's Valuation.  This land is still owned by my branch of the Alcorn Family (Margaret, the widow of my uncle George who passed away last year).

The above information was mainly sourced from some oral history I picked up in about 1979 when I visited Horn Head and spoke with Andy "Rooney" Alcorn who would have been a nephew of your wife's father John as was my father William "Gusty" Alcorn.

Thanks for the work you have done so far on this AlKar and others. Getting a wedding date for William and Margaret is a big step forward for me. Also, I particularly enjoyed the YouTube Video of Great-uncle John of whom I have heard so much.  As I stated at the beginning of this I have just started to become interested in the Alcorn family history again and would be happy to share any information I have picked up with anyone else reading these posts.