Hi Bruce, Sorry for the delay in responding to your feb 28 post. Thanks for clarifying about the McDOWALL name spellings. Good to know prior to the 19th century the spelling of names was arbitrary. Let me explain my "other thoughts" section a little better. In my research, whenever I came across an Ancestry.com source with "Wigtown" listed as the city of the event, I assumed it was the town of Wigtown that looks like from a map it is located physically near the water. I did see some notations that mention "Wigtownshire" specifically as the county but most the listings said specifically "Wigtown, Wigtownshire, Scotland." Thank you for clarifying this as I wasn't familiar with all the notations of Wigtown you mentioned. So in my research for example, in the scenario I mentioned before with Mary's parents and husband, these are the records I found from sourced Ancestry.com public family trees: * * *Grizel McDOWAL* b. Wigtown, Wigtownshire, Scotland m. 20 Dec 1740, Wigtown, Wigtownshire, Scotland d. 15 Oct 1752, Scotland *Alexander McWILLIAM* b. 1715, Wigtown, Wigtownshire, Scotland d. 1752, Scotland *Charles PAUL* b. 01 Sep 1782, Glenluce?, Wigtown, Scotland m. 18 Jun 1809, Penninghame, Wigtown, Scotland d. 13 Jun 1858, Morristown, New Jersey That's interesting that Mary McDowall was a common name at that time and that Nicholas was a female name. I will send you privately Family Group Sheets as PDFs showing how I worked back to Mary McDowall from my maternal grandmother. *If this Mary McDOWALL's parents were Andrew McDOWALL & Jean McWILLIAM,** then Mary & Charles didn't follow the naming tradition.* *I'm not sure what you mean by this?* *You say that Mary McDOWALL died in Morristown, NJ in 1854 and that’s where your grandmother was born and raised. I presume that Mary McDOWALL and Charles PAUL moved from Wigtownshire to the USA sometime between 1817 and 1854. Do you have further information on that timing?* *It looks like Daniel JAMIESON and Mary and Charles's daughter Jane PAUL moved from the Ulster Plantation to the US around 1833-1835. I don't have this definitely but see my notes on PDF.* *Penninghame is as far as one can be from Kirkmaiden and remain in Wigtownshire. You mentioned some concern about that distance and I share that concern. It is not prohibitive of the Mary McDOWALL born in Kirkmaiden being married in Penninghame, but does make me wonder if it was a different Mary McDOWALL. If you have some means to establish this was the same one, that is good, but it can’t be established only on the basis of no other one of suitable age being found in the OPRs. The OPRs are far from being a complete record of births.* *This is all true and I need to keep searching for my sources to make sure.* *Assuming that either you already have evidence or that we can find it, the next step is to establish if her father was the same Andrew McDOWALL who was born 7 Dec. 1758 to John McDOUALL of Logan, Kirkmaiden and Helen BUCHAN, and died 03 May 1834. He was the one who was MP for Wigtownshire from 1784 - 1796 and 1802 – 1805.* *I agree. Any suggestions would be welcome.* *The fact that the baptism entry described him as Andrew McDOWALL, Esqr., certainly fits. What should be kept in mind, however, is that Andrew McDOWALL was a very common name, and there were others amongst the land-owning lines. It would therefore be great if the Kirk Session records can verify that it was Andrew McDOWALL/McDOUALL of Logan or Culgroat.* *I have asked the Dumfries library is they have any suggestions on this. Would love any thoughts you or others may have.* *I do have to wonder though, how you were able to assign Jean McWILLIAM as the daughter of Alexander McWILLIAM and Grizel McDOWALL?* *I have sent you her info on PDF too.* Thanks for your help! Regards, Jamieson -- Warm Wishes, Ms. Jamieson Haverkampf Cell 404-964-5060 *For more information about my writing, illustrating and voiceover work check out my website*: https://sites.google.com/site/jamiesonhaverkampf/ *For more information about my award-winning caregiver book Mom Minus Dad: The Essential Resource Guide for Busy Adults with a Newly Widowed Parent, check out this website:*www.momminusdad.com.* For additional suggested caregiver books:* Find Mom Minus Dad and other Caregiver books in my Amazon store<http://astore.amazon.com/wwwtheparentl-20> * *

Hi Jamieson, In answer to your latest posting, I offer the following comments: At the risk of sounding like a wet blanket, I need to point out that a lot of family trees uploaded to Ancestry.com are unreliable. Ancestry.com do give a warning that they don’t attempt to verify the information which their subscribers contribute, but I’m sure that most of us either skip reading it or dismiss it. A lot of people become enthusiastic about their family history and feverishly gather all they can. Some don’t have any background in research and concentrate on results without any understanding of what is a reliable source and what is not. Even some original documents such as death certificates may contain false information, let alone transcribed documents. A common fault is to assign parents to an ancestor on the basis that they only found one baptism record which fits the known age of that ancestor. That is not valid, as I’ve outlined previously. Sometimes that age is wrong in the first place because the ancestor fibbed about his/her age in the census returns. So, this enthusiast wants to share, and does so by uploading the information to Ancestry.com. Along come later researchers who find this information and it becomes perpetuated. I found that misinformation on my family has been uploaded to Ancestry.com, and that others have repeated the same incorrect information. Someone without my knowledge of the correct facts could easily be misled, especially as it appears that the misinformation has more than one source. Yes, more than one person putting their names to it, but only one source, and that source was someone who did sloppy research. You can see why I’m particularly touchy on the subject, but I’ve also heard this same complaint from many colleagues at the genealogical society. My point is to be very wary of information contributed to Ancestry,com by well-meaning folk. It may be that they have some privately held sources such as a family bible, or old family documents, which has enabled them to link publicly available data together. It also may be that they have jumped to conclusions, with a combination of inexperience and wishful thinking. I get the impression that you already have some reservation about the info' you obtained from Ancestry.com public trees, but couldn't resist the opportunity to get on my soap box. Mary was a very common name in Wigtownshire, appearing in most families. McDOWALL, together with its spelling variants, was the 3rd most common name in Wigtownshire, thus there lots of Mary McDOWALLs. The traditional naming pattern was to name the first son after his paternal grandfather and the first daughter after her maternal grandmother. The second son would be named after the maternal grandfather and the 2nd daughter after the paternal grandmother. Some families followed this, but not all. Some varied it by following it in part. Thus its not a reliable means of determining the grandparents, but when it works, it does add weight to other evidence. Perhaps it was only the JAMIESONs who migrated from Ulster to the US and were ‘Scots Irish’ by way of a plantation background. Its a bigger stretch to say that of the PAULs. The Ulster Plantation was not a place name, but an English scheme to control rebellious Irish: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantation_of_Ulster Regards, Bruce