The Sons of Cornet Andrew Spruell

 Although there have been a lot of us working on the sons of Cornet Andrew Spruell over many generations, there is a lot we still don’t know. Some progress is being made with more information that is emerging. However, as this happens, the picture becomes naturally becomes more and complicated.Although there have been a lot of us working on the sons of Cornet Andrew Spruell over many generations, there is a lot we still don’t know. Some progress is being made with more information that is emerging. However, as this happens, the picture becomes naturally becomes more and complicated.

Have we all the Pieces? 

We thought, for example, that we had some of the pieces of the jigsaw of Cornet Andrew’s family, and that these pieces had been identified by the great Sproule researchers of the past and by ourselves, and the task now was to continue the work of fitting them together. Then we get lovely transcriptions of old records, for example the super records from Fermanagh,  and we find that we only had a fraction of the jigsaw pieces – there were stacks more! We need to get any relevant new pieces onto the table so that we can consider them as we continue to work on this.

Are the Assumptions Correct?

Another thing that has been happening lately in our research of the sons of Cornet Andrew is that we look at some of the basic facts, those assumptions that have gone unchallenged for a very long time, and we say – that cannot be right! The more we do of this, this challenging of assumptions, the better chance we have at making progress.

Just recently a fellow Sproule researcher, Jamie Reid, ripped to shreds one of my own beautifully developed pieces of research about this family, and left it in tatters on the cutting room floor. He did it with a masterful piecing together of many different clues – a super job that, even through my tears, it really blew me away admiration! I’ll go into that at a later stage – or hopefully Jamie himself will.

Now we want to keep that going so that we can make some more progress.

So to endeavour to begin this I am going to do two things over the next few posts before we move forward:

1.       Firstly, I want to pin down and identify clearly what we actually do know about the sons of Cornet Andrew. What are the actual facts? Let us summarise exactly what we know from those documents where the 5 sons of Cornet Andrew are identified and named. What have we learnt about them from 1719 deed and the 1731 deeds?

2.       What do we know, if anything, about the two unnamed sons of Cornet Andrew? The deeds named 5 boys, but we know that there were 7 sons.

3.       Before we move forward, are there any other pieces of this jigsaw that should be looked at and put on our table? I will name a few that have to be taken into consideration, and they are not in the picture at all up to now.