Irvins, Doaks, Logans and McCampbells of Kentucky and Virginia

This is the "I.D.L." home page!

About this book. Toward the end of 1915,¹ Sarah Margaret (Logan) Morris finished work on what must have been a labor of many years, a 121-page book ("I.D.L.") containing everything she knew about her ancestors who immigrated from Northern Ireland in the 18th century, and about their numerous descendants. My grandmother, Alice (Seward) Walker, obtained a copy of the book and it eventually found its way into my possession.

After I started work on the Carey Family Album, I realized there was a lot of information in I.D.L. which might be of value to others who are descended from the Scots-Irish settlers who migrated through Pennsylvania to the Shenandoah valley, then on to Kentucky and Indiana. I decided to add its pages to the Carey family album web site. This project would have taken an enormous amount of time without the help of a scanner.

The editing process. I.D.L.'s pages were scanned, then converted to web pages of convenient size. The scanning process has an error rate of less than 1%, but it's likely some scan errors still exist, even after proofreading. I've tried to preserve the appearance of each page of Mrs. Morris' book, and have kept her text unchanged. However, I'm aware of some errors and apparent contradictions, including some for which my grandmother pencilled in corrections.

For the most part, my own knowledge of the people or events described in I.D.L. is limited to what I can read in it. In case you question anything you see, please send me e-mail. I'll double check the original text and either correct any errors of transcription, or post your comments or opinions as footnotes.

I'm adding corrections in blue or footnotes wherever I see what I believe are errors, or to provide additional information. Alice Walker's comments are indicated as follows: original text grandma's corrections.

Although I've tried to reproduce Maggie Morris' text exactly as she wrote it, I've done some reformatting in the interest of legibility, breaking down her long paragraphs into shorter ones and indenting her often chaotic lists of family members to clarify generational relationships.

Please use Mrs. Morris' biographical index to locate persons who might be mentioned in I.D.L. There are links from the Carey family album's surname index to I.D.L.'s biographical index, as well as links in the bio-index to take you to relevant pages of our family album.

Charles W. Carey,
November 2003.

Additional Scots-Irish resources at other sites:

• Excerpts from The Scotch-Irish: A Social History, by James G. Leyburn.
• Why You Need To Know The Scots-Irish, a 2004 article by James Webb in Parade magazine.
• Secret GOP Weapon -- The Scots-Irish vote, another James Webb article which ran in the Wall Street Journal at about the same time as the preceeding.
• Chronicles of the Scotch-Irish Settlement in Virginia, Extracted from the Original Court Records of Augusta County 1745-1800, by Lyman Chalkley.
• Colonial Scots-Irish Immigrants: The Irish Records, by Kyle J. Betit.
• The Scotch-Irish in America, a 1906 book by John Walker Dinsmore.
• The Scotch-Irish in Virginia From "Old Virginia and Her Neighbours" by John Fiske, 1897.
• The Scotch-Irish in America, a 1915 book by Henry Jones Ford.
• America's Scotch-Irish And The Rove Rationale, a 2003 article by Steve Sailer.
• Maxwell History and Genealogy: Including the Allied Families of Alexander ..., by Florence Wilson Houston, et al, which mentions several of the same people and places which we find in I.D.L., and available in its entirety, thanks to Google Books.

Additional research. As mentioned, we've made a number of minor corrections here and there. We've also heard from several fellow researchers who have contributed significant new information or raised questions about certain parts of I.D.L. You may wish to read:

• Page 64. The family which Mrs. Morris listed as Robertson turns out to have been Reischauer and to have included the late U.S. Ambassador to Japan.
• Page 81. There may be cases of mistaken identity among the myriad Doaks and Dunns! Two researchers have given us their best ideas on the subject.
• Edward Erwin, Sr. – his origins. Some questions and comments on this ancestor.
• "Correcting" the family of Edward Erwin, Jr. A discussion of the many errors and inconsistencies in Mrs. Morris' information on this family.

Available in Print. A "facsimile reprint" of Mrs. Morris' book is now available at a reasonable price from Ancestral Links. I don't have any information on the quality of this publication.