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This is all very confusing for an Aussie girl!   

Best Wishes,
Sarah WALKER (m.s. HALL)
Australia



It's confusing for this Scottish boy too! My 2 x great-grandmother Agnes Petticrew and her siblings were brought across to Scotland from the Belfast area in the 1830s by their widowed mother Jane Petticrew, née Murray, after the death of her husband Archibald. I thought I had found every member of the family in the various Scottish censuses, where their place of birth is given simply as "Ireland", but now I've discovered that Agnes had another sister I didn't know about, called Jane Petticrew, who gives her place of birth in various Scottish censuses as Co. Antrim, Ireland.

At about the same time as I discovered Jane's existence, I finally managed (after about 20 years of looking!) to find their mother Jane Murray's death-certificate, which gives her parents as William Murray, stonemason, and Nancy Howat. I have a copy of Martin's 1841 directory of Belfast, which lists a William Murray, "stone-cutter", in Scotch Row, which to judge from my Belfast map is in Ballymacarrett. Looking for Howats on the IGI, anywhere in Ireland, I got 8 hits, nearly all of them in "Ballymacarrett, Co. Down". I suspect Ballymacarrett was where my Petticrews lived before my 3 x gt.grandfather Archibald Petticrew died and his widow Jane Murray brought the family over to Scotland. And the fact that one of the daughters, Jane, gives her place of birth as Co. Antrim rather than Down, just seems to show that even the locals were unsure whether they were in Down or Antrim.

Harry

The major source for researching ORRS in the County Down is Ray A. Jones "Ulster Pedigrees. Descendants, in Many Lines, of James Orr and Janet McClement, Who Emigrated from Scotland to Northern Ireland ca. 1607". The title says it all! Jones's book is based on the ORR family-trees drawn up in the 1830s by Gawn Orr of Castlereagh (they were mainly based on headstone inscriptions) and deposited in the Linen Hall library in Belfast. I wrote an article about my own researches which was published in 1988 in FAMILIA, and I counted no fewer than 501 separate surnames in the index to the above book, making it a priceless resource for Co. Down genealogy, especially as many of the headstones read by Gawn Orr have since disappeared.  All the names mentioned in postings on this thread, e.g. McCune, McCormick, Frame, are in there somewhere.

Harry