SNIPPET: Richard E. DEVLIN from Kingston, NH, has written about his search for his family's roots in Ireland in 1999 in Cork's "Irish Roots" magazine. He shared that the DEVLINs were gone now from Altaglushin, that for 16 centuries the glens of South Tyrone had been the ancestral shelter for the O'DEVLINs (O Doibhilin in Irish) but only the high crosses in the Galbally churchyard and the memories of a dwindling number of local people who knew them remain as evidence of their existence. Lost in the mists of the past was the time in 1854 when, following some unknown family calamity, 1-year-old Edward DEVLIN was sent off to England to be raised by relatives unknown and 8-year-old George DEVLIN was sent off to America by way of Liverpool and New York, also with persons unknown. Both ended up in the Boston area and produced large families whose descendants are many in number today. Both branches of the Devlin family, one from Ireland, and the other from America lived out their lives as did succeeding generations, unknown to each other. Historical background -- Per Mr. DEVLIN, "In 1607, on a grey and sombre day, fifty people boarded a vessel at the quay in Rathmullen and sailed out into Lough Swilley in Donegal, leaving Ireland forever. At the railing looking back with bitterness and anguish was an older man in his 60s, Hugh O'NEILL, chieftain of the Tyrone clans, known as the Red Hand of Ulster, and next to him was young Rory O'DONNELL chief of the Donegal clans. After years of fierce fighting against the English, these were the last two Irish chieftains in possession of their hereditary lands, now fleeing into exile on a legendary voyage known as the Flight of the Earls, one of the darkest moments in the long history of Irish resistance to English domination Left behind to face the fury of the English were the smaller clans that were allied with the O'NEILLs and one of the most prominent of these were the O'DEVLINs. Without the military skill of the O'NEILLs to oppose them, the English crown poured Scot settlers and land agents into the hereditary lands of the Tyrone clans in a furious flood of seizure and confiscation known as the Great Plantation Period. Swept aside in the harshest manner, the native Irish were pushed off the lands and forced to find survival or death in the wilds of the surrounding hills. The hills were called the Heather Edge Hills and the ragged and battered remnants of the Tyrone clans who somehow managed to survive and endure during the next 400 years, came to be known as the People of the Heather Edge. The people of the Heather Edge were made up of the descendants of Tyrone's noblest families -- O'NEILL, QUIN, DONNELLY, HAGAN, HAMILL, MULGREW, McSHANE, McCOWELL, DALY, DEVLIN, and others. In the upper reaches of the rugged hill country, they formed communities separate from the Charter Towns of the Plantar English, like Dungannon and Newtownstewart, a pattern that persists to this very day. It was here where only the heather would grow on the barren stony soil of the uplands that the old clans of Tyrone began their lives anew. In these little communities "up the glen," as the Irish say, life reverted to the old Gaelic ways. They had their own fairs and market days and every house had a woolen or linen loom and flax was grown to pay the rent to the planter landlords. The women of the Heather Edge exchanged woolens and yarns with their more fortunate neighbors around Galbally and Dernaseer for oatmeal and potatoes. The men cut turf and sold it to the bleach works in Dungannon and Stewartstown. Tradition had it that the Heath Edge People had their own burying ground in Altaglushin on a hilltop called Crocknavarc, the Hill of Tombs. The first houses in the Heather Edge was built of sods or simply consisted of an excavation hollowed out of the bog banks and roofed over with fir saplings and thatched with heather. One can only imagine the difficulties of sustaining life in those wet and primitive structures. The ordinary food of the day was potatoes and oatmeal but on special days such as the Eve of Lent, a potato pudding was made, a loaf of bread procured, tea was poured and a bottle of poteen, locally called "Bobbilisty" was never hard to get. A pint of legal whiskey in those days only cost ten pence but in Heather Edge, the local men considered it a slight of their skills to have to buy whiskey. Life was harsh but livened up by simple ceilis at the houses at night where the local fiddler and accordion player and storyteller were always up the call. And so the old clans persisted in their way."