Stewart and Douglas Family History

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It seems appropriate that I start this family history blog with the oldest confirmed relative that I have.

Family history is something of a now and again task for me in that I’ll sometimes find a real mine of information about one strand of relatives and spend months working on it which are followed by a gap of several years before the next piece of the puzzle turns up. Or, to put it another way, there will probably be gaps in the postings that appear here (my aim is a minimum of once a month but more than likely once a week to begin with).

Although the domain name might imply that I’ll only be looking into the Stewarts I’ll certainly be looking for Douglas’ too and will be adding in more names as I go along.

But what about Andrew?

Well, he is the very first entry in the family bible that his son William started back in the 1800s. That bible is quite a rich source of information covering the period from 1805 through to the early 1900s to which I have added information about the majority of his descendants over the years. I’ll be touching on some of those in the coming months in the hope that some people out there will be able to fill in some of the gaps that I have and hopefully I’ll be able to fill in some of the gaps in their family trees. This’ll take us from Northern Ireland, probably to Scotland (though funnily enough, I’ve no relatives listed there), definitely to Canada and both the east and west coast of America.

Unfortunately, the bible limits the information, for the most part, to names, dates of birth, marriages, and (for the older entries) dates of death. There is little or no information about locations of any of these events. Not to worry though as the dates give us enough information to find out other things as you’ll see in the entries to come.

The Mormon records indicate that Andrew was born in Ballymoney in County Tyrone in Northern Ireland. However, that information comes from an unknown relative who converted to the Mormon faith at some point and it is not reliable. I know that because I have gone to some of the registry offices in the locations mentioned in the Mormon record to get copies of the original documents and there is no record of the people mentioned. Furthermore, other relatives have indicated that the family moved to Northern Ireland in the 1800s yet there are no locations in the Mormon record for Scotland. So, in due course, I will be working backwards through the records starting from known information (more anon about this).

Anyway, that’s the first of my messages in a bottle.

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