Hi Charles, > Mary Ann married William BLEVINS ca 1828 in Armagh. I believe he was English and that is off-topic on this list? No, not at all! OUr website has more info, but the term "Scotch-Irish" is an American ethnic group. Beyond that ethnicity in Ireland is very complicated. THough the large mob of Scots who came in the early 1600s are what we usually think of, several of the public plantations of King Jamie were English. One of course Armagh. So many people are of English descent in Armagh. The local patois is different from parts of County Antrim settled by Ullans speaking Scots. Throughout Ireland there were populations of Germans and Huguenots as well as as English and Irish who converted to Protestantism. Since the research methodologies are the same, we cover them here. ALl the other Irish lists rightfully focus on the majority of IRish who were Catholic. This one focuses on Protestants. To resarch them you need to understand the records in Ireland a little differently. You access them in a different order. You are not going to find an Irish native who spoke only Irish on an early 1600s muster list of British Protestants brought in to subdue the IRish. Like looking for the names of King PHillip's warriors on muster lists of Yankees! Dumb de dumb dumb. However these muster lists are gold if you are searching for Protestants. ALso we require specialized knowledge about church records. Land records are more important to us as well as freemen's lists and military records. However we all must learn to do Irish estate work -- if we are lucky enough to be able to figure out what estate our ancestors lived on. By the time of the 19th century, religion doesn't matter so much any more: all Irish reseaarch is the same. Before that though, it is different depending on who you look for. There's a very useful horde of info on people in the Armagh area that's also in LDS. You can go to the Armagh Museum to get it but I suggest you pause in Salt Lake, check out it and a few other things in a two day marathon, then take the airplane to Armagh and climb Navan fort! GO to the museum and check things you can only get there. Let us know when you go as a certain lister can give you the names of the bst places to eat. I am still trying to lose the pounds I gained when I was eating with her. Anyway, there are very early rent rolls of church tenants. There are also depositions of people who suffered during the Rising in the 1640s. Because the people were English, they were attacked first by the Irish. I vacuumed out a lot of stuff related to my surnames. I ordered the film and spent a few weeks taking careful notes and photocopying. Beats going to the Museum and spending 10 minutes in a rush. There's a couple film in the Salt Lake collection with a lot of info n the area. I will find the film and post them. Mostly it's 'big names', not little guys, but hey, hope springs eternal, right? McElroy is very common with a lot of variants. Look for something unique...like she named a son Aloyious. Maybe her da was named that? I will need to do a DNA study to locate the home of my ANDERSONs, but I think they are from north/central Antrim. The family legend is that they were from there and there was a family near Bushmills that came with the McDonalds. My family were Covenantors, red haired, bad tempered, very musical, and carpenters. THey were carpenters when they came in the 1770s and my cousins are still building. The Andersons over there built Bushmills. One family to the south WAS involved with the Covenantors and married a HOUSTON (big Covvie name). I even found they were musical. The left brain knows this is all hoooiee, but the right brain is very excited. It narrows down where I need to tell the Loyalists to put the road block to gather DNA, at least. (Can't hire the IRA...they're AFRAID to go there) My other 'fuzzie' genealogy story is about the BLACKs. My mother says "They all look alike, there's a zillion of them, they married one another and you can never tell them apart". Mine were in South Carolina by 1795. We know where they came from because a brother was a famous United Irishman and American clergyman:Rev. John Black. They came from Ahoghill Village in Antrim. Of course my Robert married an AIKEN. A zillion of them that area... And WYLIEs, of course....if you know the surnames of this area of Antrim, you can pick these guys out in the middle of South Carolina or Mississippi. Anyway in a local history book on the area I found the VERY SAME passage about the local BLACKs as my mother: There were a zillion of them, they all intermarried, they looked alike and you can't tell them apart. Are these the same people? YES. Can I prove it? NOt till I get all the DNA samples. But I can find a zillion John and Robert Blacks in County Antrim. can't tell if they are the same or different guys. WOn't ever! The records don't exist. BUT if I collect a lot of info, I can narrow down the area where I need to look for DNA samples. So look for some dirt on your McIlroys...funny moles? Religious fanatics? WHo'd they hang out with? Who were their neighbors? What did they do for a living? Did they get into trouble a lot? That's GOOD! Lots of court records. Speaking of which, the US was the penal colony before Australia. A fair number of our ancsetors didn't have to pay their way over. You got a key element: a place in Ireland, so you can go look for McIlroy families in that area. How we eyeball that is fire up a CD with an index to the tithe applotments. This index has faults. You can pay soemone in Ireland to check the originals. Create a spreadsheet and note all the families. Then do the same with Griffith's CD. WIth Griffiths y ou get more info like the townland. Your's left but some others lived nearby, maybe. Get the townlands of all you can. They will cluster. THen learn who owned those townlands. You can get that from Griffiths. You can then do research on that guy. You can get huge amounts of estate info at PRONI, the gov website. you find out where they put their records. You hire Robert at www.ulsterancestry.com or someone else to check the estate records. Meanwhile you also check all the other records and you try to learn about the history of McIroy's in the area. Bell "Book of Ulster Surnames" tells you it can be Irish or Scots. It gives you a lot of variants to check for. The variant McIlroy is only found in Ulster. The Irish McElroy clan was in Fermanagh (next county over) and also in COunty Antrim. You can expect lots of them in Armagh. Here you need to know Armagh geography. WHere were these guys? Can you get a better bead on where? The Catholics got pushed to the higher land that was worse farming. As rents were raised and Protestants left for Amerikay, Catholics bought leases for better land. But locally everybody knows the history of everybody. So if you can figure out where exactly they were, you can learn a lot about who they were and whether they wee probably Irish or Scots. Or how long they were there. Or if they are still there. A few local experts are on this list -- but you will probably need to give us more of a location for them to be able to help. Linda Merle > I'm interested in Mary Ann and her ancestry. Is anyone researching this McElroy family? Or, is it researchable? > > > thanks, Charles > > > ________________________________________________________________ Sent via the WebMail system at mail.fea.net