Edward Johnston Sproule of Urbalreagh - NOT a Grennan Sproule

Edward Johnston Sproule of Urbalreagh is not the son of James Sproule of the Holm and his wife Rebecca Scott of Ballyare. But who is he?

When people are put incorrectly onto a family tree, it is a major problem. What it means is that the descendants then stop looking for the right family tree for these folk, and they therefore remain homeless. My aim is to head descendants off searching for their real ancestors – to bring these homeless ancestors back their rightful tree.

There are a few that recur on the family tree of James Sproule of the Holm and Rebecca Scott of Ballyare that absolutely don’t belong there. I am hoping to help to begin the search for their real family. One of these is Edward Johnston Sproule of Urbalreagh.

Edward Johnston Sproule of Urbalreagh – not a Grennan Sproule

I don’t have any idea why people are putting Edward of Urbalreagh in the Grennan Sproules. Urbalreagh land has never been in this family, and the names of his children are very definitely not Grennan Sproule names. None of the children were named in Grennan or Spamount wills. There is nothing at all to link him to the Grennan Sproule family. However, Edward Johnston Sproule is indeed a mystery man, very intriguing! 

We have one clue in his name. The fact that this Edward is Edward Johnston Sproule, a name confirmed on the death certificate of his child James A. Sproule, would suggest that Edward’s mother was, in fact, a Johnston lady.

Edward Sproule farmed 32 acres in Urbalreagh in Griffiths Valuation and there are no Sproules mentioned there in the Tithe Applotment. So Edward arrived on this land between the 1830s and 1850s.

Edward Sproule of Urbalreagh in Griffiths Valuation

At his wedding in 1861 to Margaret Caldwell, daughter of William Caldwell, Edward’s father is given as James Sproule. My own thinking was that Urbalreagh is close to Liscreevaghan, or Clady Sproul, a townland where James Sproule is the family name. Could Edward be a son of James Sproule of Liscreevaghan? There are more clues, some that head us away from Liscreevaghan.

Edward is no longer on the Urbalreagh land in 1870 in the PRONI Valuation book. (VAL/12/B/42/1B) Edward and Matilda Caldwell have only three children recorded that we know of, and they are all born between the years 1863 and 1866 – no children as yet found after this.  So  Edward Johnston Sproule disappears in the late 1860s, he is off the land and he has no more children. Edward Sproule of Urbalreagh has likely either died or he has emigrated. However, we get more clues from his children.

When the children grow up and are adults they are spread very far apart - one is in the US, one is in New Zealand and one is in Australia. James, the oldest, arrived in the US in 1884 when he was just 21 years old.

This would suggest that Edward has not emigrated somewhere. It looks to me as if Edward must have died in the late 1860s when these three children were very young.  They were looked after either by one family, or they were split between several different families.

But the names of these children in the Urbalreagh family are very distinctive, and they must be clues to where this family belong. There is no hint of either Grennan or Liscreevaghan in these names, far from it!

Edward Johnston Sproule and Matilda Caldwell’s first child was James, born on 29 Jul 1866, but there is actually no name on this birth record. In later records he is called James A. Sproule, but on Ancestry he is named as James Ashbury Sproule. There are lots of documents for James A. Sproule including a death certificate that gives his father’s name as Edward Johnston Sproule. We know that he arrived in the US at the age of 21. He lived in Pierce, Washington, and that he travelled to Australia in 1915 to visit his sister, Sara Jane, who was living there. She is named, with her address, on his travel documents, so we know for certain that we have the right people. We know that he also later travelled to Ireland, so he was not a poor man.

James Asbury Sproule was the eldest child. It is usual for a name like Ashbury to be the mother’s maiden name. But we know that it was not – she was a Caldwell. Now the thing is that there are NO people with the name Ashbury in the northern part of Ireland.* There are a few in the southern part of Ireland, but very few.

 So where did the Ashbury come from? Was James adopted by a family named Ashbury somewhere other than the north of Ireland at some stage? Or was it that one of his parents had this family name, and they came from somewhere other than the northern part of Ireland? Was Ashbury a place name, perhaps?

The middle child is Sara Jane, born 29 Dec 1864. She married Hugh Henry White in Sydney Australia in March 1891. So she was living in Australia when she was 27. They  lived in North Botany, Waterloo, New South Wales.

Jasper Caldwell Sproule was the 3^rd child, born 29 Jul 1866 in Urbalreagh. He is in Parnell, Auckland, New Zealand in 1894,  at the age of 24. Jasper is a name that occurs very rarely in the Sproule families of Tyrone/Donegal, and when it does, it is mostly in Termonamongan.

So it looks to me as if Edward Johnston Sproule might have come from somewhere other than the north of Ireland. Where, I have no idea, but hopefully, someone will find out.

*    NOTE - there is one birth of a Charlotte Mary Ashbury, in Belfast, father Thomas Henry Ashbury, mother Annie Atkinson, on 24 Apr 1869. The father is a Reporter, and there are no further Ashbury records in Belfast so I believe he may have been there working.  The poor baby Charlotte died later that year.