Irvine Home Glencoe County Antrim Northern Ireland

After our brave ancestors were run out of Drum Castle Aberdeenshire, Scotland by the Edward I Longshanks type tyranny, they settled in Glencoe County Antrim Northern Ireland.  This is an actual photo of one of the Irvine homes from the book, Irvines and Their Kin.  Please get a free, online copy of this book and read it!  Quite an eye opener.

Irwins In Berlin X Roads and Camba

By 1882 both John and Hannah had moved on to their heavenly reward, with deaths in 1867 and 1868, and burial in Keenan Cemetery, outside Wellston, Ohio.
But this is a good map, showing the lay of the land.  Camba is on this map and was a place also known as Irwin's Station and Irwins Station.  Find Camba just above the blue area labeled "Sheridan Coal Works".  Since it was known as Irwin's Station, I am ASSUMING that it was the old family location at one point in time.  Railroad, Store, Post Office.
Latitude: 38.9647965 Longitude: -82.6051634

Back To Generational Patterns In Irwin Ancestry

I remember my father, Pat Irwin, always saying that his father, Joe Irwin, was a mechanical genius and could design or repair absolutely anything.  Joe intuitively understood the mechanics of things and Pat must have inherited that gene because he was much the same.

Above is a photo of Rendville, Ohio after the coal boom had gone bust. Not exactly a community bursting with the promise of economic advancement.  So, while my grandfather Joseph had the know-how to invent, restore and re-purpose devices of all description, he really did not get much Career Opportunity to do so.

The very contraptions used for intensive deep mining fell into disrepair since everything below ground was drilled out by the late 1920's. So, when a railroad job became available upon return from WWI Argonne Forest duty, he stayed with that job until he died on that job in the 1940's.
But of course, a down-on-its-luck coal camp is also exactly the circumstance that would make Joe Irwin the most popular fellow in town.  Just about any man or woman who knew how to patch, plaster or piece life back together was a sought after citizen.  Can you help me rebuild the engine on this 4 cylinder Henderson motorcycle?  If you could answer in the affirmative, you must have been worth your weight in gold.

I always wondered where the historical mechanical intelligence originated. How was it passed down and where did these Irwins get the opportunity to absorb such problem-solving in application?
Well, along came the Genealogy with this explanation.  Please Read Below!

James Irwin, born Glencoe County Antrim in 1700, was a Scotch-Irish immigrant who came to Pennsylvania in 1729 with seven other Irwins. Those Irwins operated mills, a bleaching plant and a smith shop in Northern Ireland. 

James Irwin in 1748 owned 540 acres in Peters Twp. just north of present day Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. By 1766 he owned a mill valued at three pounds 12 shillings and by 1769 the value of the mill was 10 pounds six shillings.

During the Revolutionary War, Archibald Irwin's oldest son, also named James, began to do commissary duty for the Western Army at Irwinton's Mills.  James Irwin organized pack horse trains to carry flour, meat and other provisions to Pittsburgh for the Western Army. James Irwin acted as an assistant commissary under the appointment of Col. George Morgan, who was Commissary General for the Western Army, whose headquarters were at Pittsburgh.

Large quantities of flour were made at Irwinton's Mill, packed in kegs, each weighing about one hundred pounds, to be sent west. Flour was brought in from Washington County, Maryland. Large numbers of beef cattle were driven to Irwinton's plantation to be purchased, slaughtered and processed in a recently erected slaughter house, and sent to the Western Armies. 

James Irwin stated that the Pittsburgh Quarter Master Department had four brigades of pack horses each containing about one hundred horses, with one horse master and twelve riders to each brigade, to carry provisions west for the Army. The mill must have been busy and crowded, with one hundred pack horses being loaded, and with their drivers and horse master preparing for a trip over the mountains to Pittsburgh.

The original Irwinton Grist Mill, built around 1760, had over 25 belts running, 10 belt elevators, water turbines, a variety of 15 pieces of equipment, rope hoist, wooden cogs, hydro electric was produced while lots of pulleys and shafts kept turning.  Sounds like a wonderful and complex Rube Goldberg universe to grow up in.

We also get the picture of a very PRACTICAL patriotism.  This family helped launch and liberate a fledgling democracy by putting bread in its belly, blankets on its bed, boots on its feet, meat on its table, shirts on its back and powder in its musket.  They helped make the physiological struggle for Independence a reliable possibility.

And so we begin to comprehend how invention and innovation is a precious Inheritance, manifesting in an abandoned coal camp, where it is devalued by a morally bankrupt industry but fully utilized and appreciated by those left behind, now depending on it for their very survival.  And so it persists, one generation after another and in 2016, perhaps it is one of the gifts that you've discovered inside you and yours.

Rodeo Time In Houston March 2015

It is Rodeo in Houston, Texas and there are loads of cute cowboys and cowgirls all dressed up and ready for school celebrations where everyone gets costumed in their bright bandana colors and Cavenders boots.  Beautiful to behold each and every one.

A new season of TLC's Who Do You Think You Are? genealogy series begins March 8th so be sure to tune in or watch episodes online.  These family investigations seem to regularly turn up some type of odd pattern across generations.

Odd or eerie, you choose but it appears when we see Oprah discovering that her love of schools and education actually began with her great-grandmother, an initial trustee of the venerable Buffalo Rosenwald School in Attala County, MS circa 1929, a deeply dangerous era in which to found a school for Black children anywhere in the South.

Or Steve Buscemi learns that a favorite NYC 7th Ave restaurant was once the address of the maternal grandmother he lost from suicide.

Or Sarah Jessica Parkers stars in the 1993 Halloween movie, Hocus Pocus, and then finds out years later courtesy of TLC, that her 10th great grandmother was tried for witchcraft in the infamous Salem, MA hysteria.  High Strangeness Indeed!

The TLC investigations are not about celebrities attempting to tie some additional pedigree to their stardom.  Instead,  these real people are helped by good researchers to uncover nuggets about character, bravery, passions and the progress of those who came before.  This is what geneaology study truly entails and not simply settling for a superficial strut about, over the Irvine ancestral pile near Drumoak in Scotland.

If you've read through my Irwins Old and New blog posts, you begin to see patterns of cvic involvement.  Curiously, this ancient lineage keeps popping up in the middle of important political events.  They buddy up with Robert the Bruce and Braveheart their way through a very dangerous period in Scotland's fight for independence.

After getting run out of Scotland and County Antrim Northern Ireland for their trouble, they then show up in the USA supplying Washington's army with the soldier necessities for waging our Revolutionary War against their favorite enemy, England.  They use the finances from their bank in Cincinnati to help bail out the U.S. Treasury and two generations later,  they send three sons off to the Civil War losing one to a Reb lynching and the other to the battlefield of Antietam.

Only you can decide how any of these old and new Irwin adventures inform your life 2016.

John and Hannah Combs Irwin are certainly an interesting pair to consider.  He is Celtic to his core and she is a rich pioneer mix of Anglo-Saxon, Native American, African American and who knows what else.  He probably saved her life by taking her out of his high society life in Cincinnati where she could have been kidnapped by slave-hunting patarollers or marched out to Oklahoma on The Trail of Tears. Take your pick but both options made a farming career in Lawrence County, Ohio look like a pretty sweet alternative.  And perhaps Hannah saved John's life in return by providing him a family life with their eight children far away from the stress and dis-ease of making a living in a raucous riverfront/riverboat city.

The strangeness returned when I learned that John had served in the Mexican American War which took him directly to, you guessed it, TEXAS of all places.  Hence the establishment of Camp Irwin/Erwin or Camp Placedo, then located 12 miles west of Port Lavaca.  John's 1825 marriage in Adams County, Ohio, his farmer hood in Lawrence County, Ohio and his life and death in Berlin Crossroads Jackson County, Ohio prefigured my community organizing years during the War On Poverty where I stomped across the bones of my bloodline repeatedly, never knowing they were guiding my feet every step of the way.  Wonderful revelation!