This is our first post from the trip. I don't know if Alex Latta of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada is on this list but he is deserving of my thanks. He sent Robert Cowan a list of a couple of contacts for us to look up in St. Johnstown, Donegal, Jim Fleming and J. B. Shannon, and they proved to be very knowledgable, personalble, friendly and intelligent conversationalists. Alex. drew out on an OS (Ordinance Survey) map 6 km to the inch map (or whatever that scale is that shows every huckleberry bush on the back roads) how to find Mr. Fleming's engineering plant and as I was talking with him on the passenger side of our car he noticed our map. As "navigator," I was using the map to find Fleming, and Fleming was using the map to inform us about St. Johnstown (don't say "town," say "ton,") He pointed out that DUNDEE was the townland just the other side of the wee burn that ran by his Engineering plant just down the road, but that we were now in the village of ST. JOHNSTOWN. I asked him about the Gaelic, and he explained that "Baille Suingean" on the road signs, that "gean" was like "Sean," another name for John in Gaelic. St. Johnstown was named for St. Johns in Scotland, the old name for PERTH, St. John being the patron Saint of Scotland before St. Andrew, and the Perth football team ("soccer") is still called St. Johns. We were on the Foyle, on the eastern lip of Donegal and just to the south of Derry. It's a part of the old Laggan Presbytery and in a valley drained by the Laggan River which empties into the Foyle. This eastern crescent of Donegal, is the one area of Donegal in which there is a small concentration of Presbyterians which constitute about 3.0% of the Donegal population of approximately 40,000. About 10.0% of Donegal is protestant, with Church of Ireland, Methodists, and Presbyterians being the three protestant denominations. By Jesus, Fleming knew his stuff. The town and townland were named for an earlier pre-King James plantation colony from Elizabethan times in the 1500's, and Fleming's family had been there from that early period in the 1580's. We were two Cowans in the town where the Cowans were the local history heroes. After supper we met at a small, inconspicuous pub and warmed ourselves before a peat fire and consumed pints of Guiness (I lost count at 5, for me) to the wee hours of the morning talking about Robert Cowan and King James, and John Cowan, Robert's son, who led 100 men from St. Johnstown to the Defence of Derry, and who later became Sheriff of Derry and an Alderman before he resigned rather than signing the Test Act. One of our drinking buddies was the brother of the author of the History of the Monreagh Presbyterian Church, and I was gived a signed copy. The church is the 2nd oldest Presbyterian meeting house in Ireland, 1644. His last name was Raulston, and I explained that I had been born in Cowansville, PA and grew up on a farm next to Bob Raulston where I first learned to milk a cow. Robert told about how the author of the key Cowan resource, Cowans of County Down, was the Rev. John Fleming, and that the Flemings were intermarried with the Cowans in Virginia and the Carolinas. Jim's weakness, we found out was golf, and Robert in his 15 or so trips to Ireland had played every major course on the island. We were tight, a band of new born brothers. Jim wanted to show us around the next day. More on our Mercedes tour, later. He was surprised that neither Robert nor I was hung over. We had staggered our way through the rights of passage. The next week, in Belfast, I found a new (to me) book, PATRICK MC KAY, A DICTIONARY OF ULSTER PLACE-NAMES, The Institute of Irish Studies, The Queen's University of Belfast, which confirmed all that Jim Fleming had shared with us about St. Johnstown and Dundee. The Scottish origins of the community are preserved for posterity in the name of the community and townland. jcmaclay