Sunday, November 14, 2010

More Versions and Incidents of McOwen in Fermanagh and Donegal

The fair Coane has furnished the following instances from the 1641 Depositions:

1643: Nature of Deposition: Multiple Killing, Robbery in Donegall
Manus Oge Magoan was one of 143 Rebel soldiers named by Thomas Poe in his deposition.

1642: Nature of Deposition: Captivity, Robbery, Words in County Fermanagh
Shane McOwen was named as one of those who threatened Elizebeth Moore and her husband
and held her husband prisoner that they would be taken away unless we departed the
land and alledging the land was theirs and theire fathers and with Skines, and Pitchforkes and threatened to take away our lives.

The actual depositions are quite graphic and show the great stress that both the native Ulstermen and the transplanted Scots lived under in those perilous times.
The form of Mag rather than Mac grows stronger as you move farther north in Ulster and so I believe that Magoan could also be rendered as MacOwan or MacCowan.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Thank You, for Your Encouragement and Comments

I appreciate your prayers and good wishes very much. I also appreciate your suggestions for relieving stress. I look forward, in hope, to getting back to
the purpose of the blog.

As you might expect, my attention has been much closer to home and less on genealogy in the last week or two. Physically, the current main symptom is a side effect of being dizzy, much of which is caused by being on two blood pressure medications which each have the main side effect of causing dizziness. That seems to be part of the state of the art in treating heart and blood pressure problems.

Bonnie suggested buying a laptop computer to reduce trips up and down stairs and that is more practical now that there are several good security products available free. It was a very good thing that we took the trip to Northern Ireland this year rather than putting it off until next year. I got so worn out rushing to catch a plane at Heathrow Airport in London, I had to resort to a wheel chair to speed up the process and to keep up with Sandy. I attributed that to a severe cold we both caught on the trip, but perhaps it was early warning of the heart attack.

The newspaper reported a few days ago that passengers from Dublin to Belfast had to get off the train and onto busses because of IRA bomb threats and there was also a car bomb found on a surface street near the Belfast International Airport. We flew into and out of Belfast International Airport with no known difficulties from the
IRA.

The advice we received from John Cunningham, our tour guide, and from others as well was not to discuss religion or politics with someone you don't know well or where others you don't know could over hear.