A Needle in a Haystack

Sometimes trying to find an ancestor is like looking for "a needle in a haystack" which is how I feel researching my Slevin ancestors. Mary Slevin married Patrick George Rodgers at the Gosport Roman Catholic Chapel in May 1834. Patrick was a soldier, stationed at Haslar Barracks. Their first child, Edward, my great, great grandfather was born at the Barracks in April the following year. Being before compulsory registration and with little information on Church records, I had no idea where Mary was from. According to army records, Patrick was born in Antrim, so I thought it was likely Mary was Irish too, but being unable to find any other records of Mary and Patrick after the baptism of their son Edward, tracing the Slevin's got put in the too hard basket until recently. I needed to narrow down the area in the haystack I was looking, so I started with the surname itself.

Slevin was a surname I was unfamiliar with, so was it an Irish name? Research showed it was indeed the anglicized version of the ancient Irish name "O'Sleibhin", descendant of the son of "Sliebh". The original name holder was an associate of Malachy, High King of Ireland in his battles with Brian Boru. "Sliebh" is Gaelic for mountain and denotes a warrior of magnificent stature. Mary Slevin, therefore, was of Irish descent, but the question now was where in Ireland. Could I narrow it down to a County at least? By looking at the distribution map of the Slevin surname (below) from the Griffith's Valuation, the highest concentrations of the name were in Tyrone, Donegal and Fermanagh, as indicated within the red circle.

Slevin Households in mid 19th century Ireland
(from johngrenham.com)

The next step was to explore my DNA matches to see if I could link to Slevin descendants. Because I am seeking matches to descendants of Slevin ancestors, who would date back to the late 1700's or early 1800's, the matches will be small if at all, another challenge. This is really my only hope, for that early in Ireland, very few records still exist. What I also learnt researching this surname is that there are many variations of it's spelling - Sleaven, Slavin, Slavan and others. Lack of literacy and interpreting dialects added to these variations and another challenge for me.

After trawling through matches on Ancestry, My Heritage and FTDNA using all possible spelling variations I could think of, I had 16 matches varying from 8cMs to 26cMs. Most had limited trees which I built out. What did I learn from this exercise?

Firstly, 5 of my matches descended from 3 children of a pioneer couple of Highland County, Virginia, USA, John Slaven & Elizabeth Stuart. John was born in County Tyrone about 1723 and married in 1740 in Virginia to Elizabeth Stuart, who was from Scotland. I need to be slightly wary with these matches as I also have Stuart/Stewart's in my ancestry, which could muddy these matches. However I do have two more matches that trace back to Tyrone, one to Daniel Slevin & Catherine Holland who married in Tyrone in 1844 and to Bridget Slaven & Bernard McCarville, Bridget having been born in Tyrone about 1818. Bridget's descendants ended up in Iowa, USA, whilst Daniel's came to Victoria, Australia. Of the remaining 9 matches all trace back to Ireland, 2 to Donegal, 1 to Fermanagh, 1 to Belfast, 1 to Roscommon, 1 to Monaghan and 3 just Ireland.

Secondly, I learnt very few remained in Ireland, the majority left, 8 to the USA, 3 to Scotland, 1 to England, 1 to Australia and only three remained in Ireland in Donegal.

Through this exercise I did narrow down the area of the "haystack" to search for my Mary Slevin and it very much coincided with the red circle on John Grenham's map above. In fact I have an inkling that it probably is more specifically Dromore in Diocese of Clogher, County Tyrone, as there were a lot of Slevin's in that area and a few of my matches link back to that area or close to it. Therefore Mary or at least her ancestors were more than likely from County Tyrone. This research has provided as much knowledge about Mary as I'm likely to know due to limited records, but it is a lot more than I knew at the start. It is also another story about the Irish Diaspora.

#Slevin