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Over the past few days I discovered a John Irwin B 31/10/1867 to Robert Irwin & Catherine McKane in Ballykelly County Derry. John is My Grandmothers Grandfather.
Can anyone help me pad this out?
I had a look at Ballykelly online and it was a "Plantation Village" built in the 1830's. I would not think

I have been reading PRONI wills of Olivers who died in the Londonderry Registration District, looking for connections to Irwin / Irvine. There are four male Olivers who died in the 1870s who seem to be interrelated with Irwins, and one mentions relatives named Kane: Look at James Irwin d. 1878.

I have just established an autosomal DNA connection between my Irwin / Irvine family and descendants of Olivers of Lislane, which is what caused me to go back and read those wills. I suspect these families intermarried over the generations, as they are quite tricky to sort out. The Irwins in particular seemed to be more mobile, perhaps because of some were millers.

I could not look at birth records today on Family Search for some reason, so do not know whether you have a civil or church record, or both, for Ballykelly. Some of my family attended the Presbyterian church at Ballykelly but lived in other areas.

In future please keep to one topic rather than starting another looking for details of the same people. Earlier threads here-

Leslie Irwin d. 1872 Philadelphia = Leslie Irwin b. 1836 Ballyness, Dungiven?
KERR family
Could one "buy a township" & set up linen & corn mills in 18th C Co.Londonderry?
Robert Gault, farmer, Tamlaght, with ties to Erwin / Irvine, Alcorn, Kerr, Hazle

Apologies, Aghadowey. I have re-read my posts that began each thread and see what you mean. In my mind I was asking questions that could be answered by persons not interested in my particular families, and I wanted to highlight my basic question in the subject line so that might catch the eye of someone knowledgable about mills or pronunciation / spelling patterns, for instance.

How do you suggest I proceed at this point? As you have pointed out, I now have several threads that involve different aspects of my general search. Where would you recommend that I post my next query? And surely not everyone reads every post in this forum. How do I bring a query that is more general to the attention of someone who could answer it but wouldn't think to keyword-search for it?

To reply (with thanks) to three of you at once:

Am I to infer that Irvine is the ancestral Scottish name from which the Londonderry variants, especially the most common form Irwin, were derived? If Kerr and Irvine suggest something specific about Scottish ancestry, then perhaps that explains the fierceness with which my family insisted on these spellings. The Kerrs, at least, arrived from Scotland no earlier than the late 18th C, with money enough to buy land and set up mills. Perhaps they were, or had pretensions to, aristocracy. One of them married a Betty Irvine. She probably was local, but I can imagine that her surname, however her family night have spelled it, might have come down to me as "Irvine" because that was the "real" (Scottish) way to spell it. Does this make sense?

I understand that I must search records using all variations.

I can see that during the 19th and even into the 20th C some Irwins I have been following as likely relatives of Betty seem to have changed the family name from Irwin to the less frequent Irvine. A case in point is Samuel "Irwin alias Irvine" farmer in Drumacarney, who died in 1923 (PRONI) I have not seen the original will (that is, even a handwritten transcription), but from other records I infer that he was born into a family of Irwins, and his son John, named as executor, and John's descendants seem to have used the name Irvine. They might have liked the name better for a variety of reasons. In any case, this to me suggests an intentional spelling choice on the part of the individuals who went by Irvine. The default spelling in the area seems to have been Irwin or phonetic variants of same.

The root of my question comes from an 1856 Londonderry to Philadelphia manifest in which the names appear not to have been spelled phonetically. My known relatives John and Alexander Kerr were traveling with a possible cousin Leslie Irwine. The Kerrs were two of four children of William and Betty Kerr of the Limavady area. I would like to find out whether Leslie Irwine was her nephew. I have found a match to a Leslie Irwin in the 1841/1851 census abstracts for Ballyness, Dungiven. The forenames and occupations of this family and apparent relatives in Ballyness fit with what I know of my family story, except the distance from NL. And the rare spelling Irwine appears among the Irwins of Ballyness, most intriguingly (to me) in the will that links millers in Ballyness with millers in Drummond, and by extension, to Roe Mills. Betty Irvine Kerr's father-in-law and two brothers are said to have come from Scotland to NL, bought land, and set up corn and linen mills.

What I really want to know is who Betty Irvine was. I simply cannot find any trace of her or these Kerrs in on-line records. Perhaps someone with access to off-line church or newspaper records can find something more substantial than naming patterns to help me.

Her husband William Kerr was born about 1810 (perhaps in Scotland?). He had a younger brother John, m. Eliza Torrens of Carrowclare (the Ballykelly Torrens, not Bann Valley), with first two children John (1846) and Mary (1848)  born before this couple and their niece Eliza emigrated in 1848.

The William Kerr children were Oliver (1832), Eliza (1834), John (1838), and Alexander (1840). The sons emigrated in 1856, Oliver sailing later than his brothers. William eventually joined his family, but I don't know when or how. Leslie Irwine was born in 1837/1838 and later used the spelling Irwin. He was joined a few years later, briefly, by Robert and James Irwin/Irvine (source:Phila City Directories).

To me, Irwin, Irvine, and Irwine sound distinct. If they were all pronounced the same, looking at the carefully written 1856 manifest, I can't imagine a scenario in which Leslie's last name was something other than Irwine, unless it was Irvine and he had a speech defect. Even then, why would the person recording the names choose such an obscure spelling?

Hi Shanreagh,

I have PM'd you, per request. I look forward to hearing from you.

In response to your questions:

1) GV Revision Books:

I have not looked at Tamlaght, but have for Drumacarney and now Ballyness, Dungiven (as a possible origin of Leslie Irwine / Irwin, who emigrated with two of William Kerr and Betty Irvine's sons and settled in Philadelphia). There is a separate thread about what I have been finding about him.

You are correct that it is a rich resource.

2) The Miller family:

I have not looked for them seriously yet. My previous attempts were defeated by the commonness of the surname in the area and my unfamilarity with or lack of access to records. I put this whole question of the origin of William Kerr and Betty Irvine aside for decades and only have returned to it since mid-February. Only recently have I realized I should be looking at spelling variants such as Carr and Irwin, so in a way I am starting over.

I believe that Billy Miller lived about 4 miles from N. Limavady towards Londonderry. His unnamed sister who married an unnamed Kerr from Scotland had two children, William (m. Betty Irvine about 1831) and John (m. Eliza Torrens about 1841). Betty died about 1844, and I infer that her children then lived with, or had very frequent contact with, their mother's relatives, since I have the most detailed information about them. That the names of Billy Miller and two of his four children (William and Peggy who married Robert Gant / Gault) suggests that they also were alive in the late 1830's and 1840's. I think these names came from the memory of William and Betty Kerr's daughter Eliza, who emigrated with her uncle John and his young family in 1848, when she was 14.

I also suspect that Billy Miller's father was William, based on his nickname Billy and son William. His sister died when her Kerr sons were very young, so perhaps 1815?

As far as who were "Limavady people," I have three brothers Kerr who came to Newtown Limavady, "bo't a township," and set up linen and corn mills there. I have not yet found any evidence of this. I also know that the fourth child of William and Betty Kerr, Alexander, was born "in Newtown Limavady" in 1840-1842. His older sister Eliza wrote in her bible that she was born "in County Limavady" and told her daughter that she was born near Londonderry.

Thanks for any insights you can offer. I'm finding a steep learning curve with finding and interpreting records, let alone interpreting the notes that I inherited!n

Thank you so much. So someone who had herd(s) but not home or offices or land might have been a young man living at home who grazed sheep on someone else's property? This might explain why at least some of Samuel and Margaret's sons could have stayed in Ballyness, at least for a while.

I believe I have just established a link between the Leslie Irwin who went to Philadelphia and Irwins and Morrisons  (and Stewarts?) in Commerce, Oakland, Michigan. It is through Jane Kearns / Carnes b. Ireland 1799/1800 living with Leslie Irwin's widow and children in 1880 and a William Kerns b. Ireland 1858 living with Leslie and family in 1870. Jane Carnes was living in a household of Andrew Carnes in Commerce, Michigan in 1860, with a Morrison daughter in the household. James (age 56)?and Martha Morrison b. Ireland are living next door.

The Kearns name is unfamiliar to me (unless it's a variant of Kerr), but I do know that Irwin researchers who have ties to Morrison and Stewart will be interested in this, and it makes the origin of Leslie Irwin of Philadelphia of more general interest. I will consult with Barb (radnor37) and start a new thread if this holds up.