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?
