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Shortly after this, the 1698 will of Nicholas Downing of Drumard near Bellaghy must have come to light. Nicholas had no children of his own but he named a brother William, and a range of nephews and nieces including Adam Downing of Rocktown near Bellaghy. He does not name Adam’s father, who had predeceased him, but Adam made a will dated 1716, in which he named his mother as ‘Jane’, and a number of siblings including a brother Samuel. From the two wills, it is apparent that the Downing family had been well established around Bellaghy for some time. Furthermore, the Rev. Calybute Downing had not included sons Nicholas or William among the meticulous parish records that he maintained. Alexander George Fullerton needed to think again. Yet the seal on Nicholas’s will carries the arms of the Rev. Calybute’s family, the Downings of Norfolk.
At about the same time, John David Downing, the last member of the Downing family to live at Rowesgift, where the family records were stored, produced, quite independently, his own version of the Downing tree, having seen Nicholas’s will. He came up with a theory that Nicholas was the son of Emmanuel Downing and Lucy Winthrop. This made him a brother of Sir George Downing the first baronet. Adam was thus deemed to be a grandson of Emmanuel and Lucy. To complete the link, he named Adam’s parents as Major John Downing and Jane Clotworthy. These names appear to be completely spurious. There is no record in Emmanuel’s copious correspondence that he had a son Nicholas, and although he had a son John, this John was born at Salem in Massachusetts and probably never visited Britain and Ireland, becoming a merchant in Nevis, WI, before marrying on his return to Boston. As Adam had a grandson, Alexander Clotworthy Downing, it is reasonable to assume that John David Downing borrowed the Clotworthy name as a plausible maiden name for Adam’s mother, but it has now been established that Alexander Clotworthy was named after his godfather, Clotworthy Skeffington, and no suitably aged daughter Jane has been found among the records of the Clotworthy family in Ireland.
At some point before 1893, Alexander George and his genealogist produced a second version of their Memoir in the light of seeing Nicholas’s will, but they may not have seen (or they ignored) the tree produced by John David Downing. They now claimed that Adam was a descendant of Lt. John Downing, who fought at the battle of Kinsale. Their tree averred that this John was the son of Arthur of Lexham. He is shown with a wife ‘Margaret’ and a son, George, who assisted the head tenant of the Fishmongers’ proportion at Ballykelly and leased 3,000 acres. George, in turn, is shown with two sons, Nicholas (from the will) and George, the Comptroller of Customs for Londonderry, who, so they claimed, married Jane, daughter of ‘Hugh Montgomery of Ballygowan’, becoming the parents of Adam Downing. As Alexander George Fullerton never lived in Ireland, where he might have been able to research these new connections, his conclusions may have seemed a bit controversial. Yet his genealogist will have had access to the Dublin Public Records Office, which was destroyed in the troubles in 1922.
Our researches suggest that much of the ancestry shown in the second version of the Memoir is plausible. We know that Sir Richard Wingfield was a kinsman of John Downing the son of Arthur, and it is reasonable to assume that he took him under his wing at Kinsale and later in Londonderry. Burke’s Royal Pedigrees of England provide a family tree that includes some of Lt. John Downing’s children. In a footnote, it states that the Downings claim descent through the Wingfields from Henry III, so they seem to be of the Norfolk family. We have found leases signed by George at Ballykelly between 1618 and 1659, and he was later buried at the Island Church on Lough Beg near Bellaghy as was Nicholas. Although there was no Hugh Montgomery of ‘Ballygowan’, a Hugh Montgomery of Gransheogh lived near Bellaghy with ‘several daughters who he married well’. He also had a grandson William Montgomery who borrowed £800, a substantial sum, from Adam, apparently his uncle by marriage.
Not everything in the second version of the Memoir is correct. It still shows Sir George Downing as a son of the Rev. Calybute Downing, thereby incorrectly claiming the Downing Baronetcy for the Norfolk Downing family. It also shows the Rev. Calybute with a son Henry, but this time without issue. It names the wife of George of Ballykelly as Dorcas Blois, who is a member of a family in Spexhall, Suffolk, married to an unconnected George Downing, who is well documented and had no children. Yet in other respects the genealogy seems realistic, notwithstanding that we have not established its sources.