By roused on Skatehive
This saga begins in Ireland in the county of Dhún na nGall (Fort of the Foreigners.) For the past couple of months I’ve been digging deeper into my ancestry. To my surprise, I came across something stretching over three generations that could easily serve as the basis for a television mini-series. To that end, when possible I tried to distill various sources into a single narrative. If you wish to dig deeper, source material and or links are in the footnotes. The story begins around 1730 in Donnegal, the most northerly county in Ireland (shown in green bordering Northern Ireland shown in red) Donnegal, aka Dhún na nGall (Fort of the Foreigners.) My great (X 6) grandparents James Simeral and his wife Margret, née Ware, were Presbyterians whose families had come from Scotland to Ireland as colonists in the previous century. In 1732 Margret gave birth to twins, and as was sometimes the custom, one of the twins, Rhoda, was given to a childless aunt to raise – for reasons you’ll soon learn,