Isn't that the title of a book or play or something? I didn't get much past 1634 in British Literature at UNC. So I am retarted on this recent lmaterial. Anyhow, it is important in our research to be ernest and thorough and not do projects half-way. I think it was about 1984 when my daughter was born that a distant relative and schoolteacher/genealogist sent me a pedigree chart tracing our Cowan pedigree back 7 generations. It was an astounding, incomparable gift that has influenced my life course as I vowed to continue the work and flesh it out. I was able to get copies of the original land applications and Patents from the Pennsylvania State Historical Museum that establised that my John Cowan and his brother William settled in a part of Westmoreland County that is now Armstrong County in 1796. CCD Appendix C. I also had to do a considerable education project as my relative had confused William with Hugh Cowan's son William who was a Revolutionary War officer and who left Lancaster County for Westmoreland County to meet up with some other Cowans. It was only through the 1850 and later census reports that I could convince her that our ancestors had come from Ireland. The reports of John's children made absolutely clear that the father and mother and three of their children were born in Ireland. This was a hard battle since the research of my relative was held in esteem by other family members because of her position as a teacher and her years of devoted reseach. She worked in an era in which a woman's research goals entailed membership in the DAR. She was stubborn, gritty and unrelenting, but my scholarship, in the end, has prevailed. Thus, these issues consumed a considerable amount of time, effort, correspondence and "political" encouragements to look at the facts. I just never got to searching the lines of John Cowan's 9 children as thoroughly as I did my immediate line. I went through all the volumes of the quarterly Cowan Clan United and waited out the repeated delays of Rev. Fleming's widely anticipated CCD. Always, always, in the back of my mind was the question, Ireland. Where in Ireland did my Cowans originate? It was a question unanswerable since there was no precise location. And all the issues of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland just made a complex matter just about incomprehensible. Never-the-less, I continued researching and made some small degree of progess in sorting out the lines of the other Cowan descendents. My breakthrough occured when I purchased a reprint copy of "Historical Cyclopedia of Indiana and Armstrong Counties Pennsylavnia." Originally published in 1891 and edited by Samuel T. Wiley. This was long after my John Cowan had died (1840) and I held little hope that I would find anything new. My eyes were opened when, in the later portions of the text, I chanced upon the Biography of Robert W. Cowan, a man I couldn't place immediately, but this was the hot kind of material I had hoped to find. It turned out that Robert W. was the grandson of John and the son of James, one of the sons born in Ireland. James would certainly have known where he and his father, mother and sisters had been born and lived in Ireland. Then I died and went to heaven. There in black and white were the words that stopped my heart and quickened my breath just as the letter did in 1984 that contained the bloodline pedigree: The Cowan family of this county, on the paternal side, is of Irish extraction, and the subject of this sketch is a son of James and Sarah Porterfield Cowan, and was born in North Buffalo township, Armstrong county, Pennsylvania, November 11, 1841. His paternal grandfather, John Cowan, was born in county Down, Ireland, and settled in Armstrong county." Wow. Wow. After two more very frustrating but highly informative years of reseach with LDS tapes and on-site reseach at Trinity College, Dublin and at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, I was able to find in the papers of the estate of a Welshman, Samuel Bagenal, a lease for three lives in the Townland of Sheepstown that linked my John Cowan to the family of Alexander Cowan of Newry, repleate with a hand drawn survey of the farm. Bagenal was given the lands for his service to the Crown following the Battle of Yellow Ford in 1598. The lands had once been the property of the Cistercian Abbey in Newry. In conclusion, it's important to be ernest, thorough, persistent, but it's more important to be fortunate and not have much competition. jcmaclay