Its really interesting, I just looked at Fearboy on a map and its no distance from Lurgan, Moate, Tubber, etc. In fact it seems to be right by where my wife's cousin TJ Kelly still has a large farm. TJ's mother was Anne Stone born at Lurgan. His brother Cormac Kelly still farms Lurgan. Re: the English connection, its one of those subjects local people don't talk about much and perhaps we can understand why. Following Irish independence in the 1920s I get the feeling most traces of English colonial heritage were swept quickly under the carpet. But having said this, my impression is that even if the Stone surname was English from the 1650s, the family were hard working people scraping a living on the land, they married Irish families and have been Catholic and 100% Irish for generations. My mother-in-law will make occasional references to the ancestral line going back to a Cromwellian soldier but has no information to substantiate this. I often wonder if there are records of soldiers being granted land. Moate was a Quaker dominated town in the 1700s, so that might also be worth exploring.
