The first footprint
Since Top of the Mountains is probably not the best place for me to write about my genealogical research (because there are already a bazillion categories there), I’ve decided to create this blog, Footprints from the Past.
What will it be? My genealogical research, basically. (There will be occasional references to Beyond, the genealogy web app I’m developing, but I expect the two blogs to generally remain separate.)
As a brief outline of where my research interests lie, my dad’s side is from North Carolina and Virginia back till the 1700s, and then mostly from Great Britain (with a few lines in other parts of Europe such as the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland). My mom’s side is from Cuba, Spain (almost entirely in Polanco, Santander), and Italy (Torre de Passeri in Pescara, Castiglione Messer Marino in Chieti, and a few other locations).
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Hello Ben,
I happen to come across your comments and queries relating to your Shanks connection back in the early 1800s.
I live in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but my grandfather was born and bred in Poyntzpass, Co Down , Ulster, The family had been there as farmers since the late 1600s- early 1700s (Scots planters).
You mentioned a brother of “Robert Shanks”, his name was John and ” he fought the British”. All the Shankss were Presbterians and in 1798 there was a rebellion in Ireland against the English due to restriction of worship for non episcopalians. I noticed an excerpt a few years back in the Poyntzpass Historical Society journal. This referred to ( within an article for the “Newry Reporter” a newspaper) to a John Shanks who was a “United Irishman” . He was one of the “Fourtowns Boys”, (Fourtowns was/is a Presbyterian Church in the Poyntzpass area) who was arrested in 1797 after hiding and being burnt out of a turf stack by the Welch fencibles. It’s too long an excerpt for here, but in a nutshell, he escaped and went to Baltimore USA and returned in 1807 to marry a young woman called Ringland. Maybe this is your Robert Shanks’s birthplace.My Shanks townland in Poyntzpass is called Lisnabrague, beside a small lake called Lough Shark or Acton Lake.
I think you must consider yourself to be Scotch Irish/Ulster Scots as well as the other interesting mix.
Good luck
Patrick Shanks