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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 2004-06 > 1087804138


From: Scaly Lizard <>
Subject: Re: Meave O'Donnell and her MacLean Husband
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 07:48:58 GMT
References: <5b747dd9.0406190657.5b5b80b5@posting.google.com> <tm8ad0118cuhjgu3rfo2d7viutlsdv655q@4ax.com> <cb4oer$62t$1@newsg4.svr.pol.co.uk>


On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 20:27:18 +0100, "siabair ~^~"
<siabair@h=tmail.c=m> wrote:

>Scaly Lizard wrote:
>> Jacques and Margaret apparently immediately emigrated
>> to Donegal, as their first son James was born there in 1576
>
>How do you know this? There were no birth/marriage/death records in Donegal
>at that time.


This is based on the work of Harold Stewart Bovaird (b. Canada
1890), whose father carried a piece of linen parchment with him
which was carried to Canada in 1836 by John Bovaird (b. Ireland
1792), and his wife Eleanor Pearson. John was Harold's greatgrand-
father. The parchment started with a Jaques Beauvert listed as
born in Paris in 1529, and held entries up to and including Harold
himself, born in Canada in 1890.

Sometime before Harold's father's death in 1937, his kids noticed
that the parchment was looking more worn every year, and asked
their father to let them transcribe it with pencil and paper. When
Harold's dad died in 1937, the parchment was not found on him,
and no one knows where it is. The pencil copy became the starting
point for HSB, and his work was eventually to produce two books,
in 1962 and 1964, which now sit in a library in Toronto.

So that's the provenance, and i guess you just have to believe
it or not. The original document is not available for study. But
there is also the fact that *all* the Bevards, Brevards,
Bovards and Bovairds go back to a small patch of Donegal
in multiple independent oral accounts, with emigration to America
starting in the early 18th Century and continuing throughout the
19th. And of course, many people still live who knew HSB,
and no one says he was a crackpot.

As with *any* research, a grain of salt is required, especially
when it is one's own ancestors involved, but the anecdotal
evidence in plethora has convinced me that such a parchment
did exist, it was seen by people still living today, and the body of
HSB's research is sound, if some of his conclusions are less
than solidly-based.

>> on the same patch of ground that remained in the family
>> until the early 1900s.
>
>I find it hard to believe that this plot could "remain in the family" as
>the whole of central and western Ulster was forfeit and regranted to
>settlers under the
>plantation of Ulster from 1609 onwards.

I misspoke, sorry. I have pics of the house that an ancestor was
born in around 1720, which would reasonably date the house
to 1719, at the latest. I can't prove it, but the oral tradition in
my branch is that the site was the first settlement of Beauverts
in Ireland, and i'd like to read the history of the MacLeans to
find out if they did indeed have the power to place French
refugees in Donegal in the 1570s. Do you know any good
places to find the history of which land was granted to which
Scottish nobles?

Perhaps, in the land reorganization in Ulster, some earlier
settlers were allowed to persist on the same land?

So many questions...

SL

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