RootsChat.Com

While I am not descended from the Wilsons, i AM very interested in the history of Pottagh.  My grandmother, Elizabeth Eagleson Farley, married John Wilson as a widow with 5 children in 1919.  My father was the youngest of those children and grew up on Pottagh;  John Wilson was the only father he really knew.  We went to visit my grandmother at Pottagh twice during the '50s.  Pottagh was willed by my grandmother to my father when she died in 1962.  While my father wished to retain the farm, it was too hard to maintain it from the States, where he had lived for many years.  He sold it to a family that still lives there.  We have visited Pottagh several times since, the last time just this month.  You may know that the RAF took over the farm, relegating John and Lizzie Wilson to just the house, during the war.  This website shows the bunkers that remain (scroll down to Castlerock Chain Home Station): http://ww2ni.webs.com/countylondonderrypt3.htm

I am part of that Wilson Family from Pottagh.   My branch descends from  Charles Wilson and Elizabeth Cust Wilson to  Hudson Cust Wilson (Charles jr.'s brother) to the son of Hudson Cust Wilson and Sarah Thompson whose name was Thomas. Thomas moved to the US and married Mary MacLean (daughter of Alexander MacLean and Elizabeth Swan). According to a letter I have from Thomas: Pottagh was in the family for over 200 years by 1856, he assumed that all Wilsons living at Pottagh had died or left Ireland.  We believe that the John Wilson wing of the family stayed on at Pottagh until John Wilson died in 1943 and his stepchildren left in 1963.