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It doesn’t seem to be fashionable any more to be proud of one’s ancestors, which is a shame. But it would be a sorry world if a historian weren’t allowed a certain interest in his own kith and kin.
My branch of the Ewings come from Lurgan, Co. Armagh, though I myself grew up in England. The Ewings first appear as burgesses in Scotland around 1500, and there is some evidence to link my line with the Ewing armigers of Bonhill, Dumbartonshire, whose arms are first recorded in the mid-sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, one or more of the Ewing families joined the growing number of Protestant Scottish settlers in Ireland; they hoped to avoid the religious turmoil of the time, and in so doing helped sow the seeds for a more recent sectarian struggle. In the eighteenth century, according to family tradition, my ancestors in Lurgan played host to John Wesley, and the family remained Methodist for well over a hundred years.
Through my mother, I am related to the Anglo-Irish Burton family, including the artist Sir Frederick Burton and more distantly, to Captain Thomas Blood who famously ran off with the Crown Jewels in 1671. Isabella Burton was the mother of Muriel and Grace Gifford, who married Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett respectively.
