Dear Betsy Your problem is that you do not know the Parish or Townland from which John BOYCE & Mary DOWNEY originated. However you are fortunate that they lived in County Donegal during the two major land surveys, Tithe Applotment and Griffiths. You can look up some 1824-1840 Tithe Applotments at the URL http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~donegal/tithes.htm On the other hand the 1847-1864 Griffiths valuation has now appeared online in a searchable format at the URL www.otherdays.com. This has opened the field up a lot to a structured computer based search strategy using Civil and RC Parish maps on URL http://scripts.ireland.com/ancestor/sitemap.htm, modern OS maps available on http://.uk2multimap.com and the old Griffith's Valuation maps available from the www.otherdays.com site. It is possible to use the Otherdays Griffiths for 72 hours on payment of an $8 fee and carry out a search for a person without prior knowledge of the townland, Parish or Barony - just the County. It is also possible to specify a search using variations of the persons name. Enter Burns and a search will be carried out for Burn, Byrne and Burns. It may be possible to track the BOYCES and DOWNEYS down to their Civil Parish and Townland. Subsequent to 1864 Civil records began in Ireland and BMDs were recorded. Prior to that you will require knowledge of their religion to track BMDs through Church records A good site for Parishes and townland names is the URL http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~bhilchey/DonegalMain.html#Civil%20Parish%20Map I don't rate your chances of finding the missing finger Liam "A bird in the bush is worth two in the Cat" ----- Original Message ----- From: "Betsy Rubel" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 8:53 PM Subject: [DONEGAL] BOYCE, Patrick and Mary circa 1820s > This is a shot in the dark mailing. I am trying to find out about John BOYCE > born 1832 somewhere in Donegal to Patrick & Margery BOYCE. He immigrated to > the Boston Mass area prior to 1870 but haven't found immigration yet. He > was missing a finger on his right hand which kept him out of service in US > (couldn't shoot a rifle!) He purchased a farm in Lincoln between 1870-1876 > for cash and married. In 1880 his nephew Patrick BOYCE (b 1860) was living > with the family on the farm. > > children of John BOYCE & Mary DOWNEY > 1) Michael Joseph-1878 > 2) John PAtrick-1881 > 3) Mary Magdalene-1882 > 4) Margaret-1884 > 5) Elizabeth Amanda-1887 > 6) William James-1890 > 7) Manley Bernard 1892 > 8) Edward Francis -1897 > > > Thanks > Betsy > > > > ==== IRL-CO-DONEGAL Mailing List ==== > Our County Donegal website is: http://www.mindspring.com/~dickod/donegal/index.htm > If you have genealogy data for Donegal, please submit to URL above. > > ============================== > To join Ancestry.com and access our 1.2 billion online genealogy records, go to: > http://www.ancestry.com/rd/redir.asp?targetid=571&sourceid=1237 >