To the girl from Georgia and others. I have read all your old postings with delight for years. Your Christopher's father is as big a mystery as mine. There is another Christopher Irvin who probably came through Virginia before settling in Rowan county, NC. I have chatted with one of his descendants and he is stuck just like we are. It is proving almost impossible to separate all the Christophers or tie them to a particular county in Pa. Someone will break something one day. I hope I live so long. I personally believe part of the problem lies with the book "Irvines and Kin." The editor, author and compiler, Lucinda Boyd, was a descendant of Andrew Irvine who married Elizabeth Mitchell and moved first to Kentucky and then Clinton county Ohio in the 1780's. Lucinda Boyd was a zealot who was enamored with heraldry and the great "Lairds" of Scotland and Ireland. She claimed that her Andrew Irvine was the son of the legendary Alexander Irvine who married into the Gaults and thus all the "seven brother" and "George and Ann" business. I am reasonably convinced that Andrew's father was Christopher "Arwhin" who died in Prince Edward county, Va. in the 1760's. The Alexander of Boyd's mythology was a generation before Andrew's father. We have searched mightily for this Bedford county Alexander to no avail. The Alexander Irvine from Halifax doesn't work and the surveyor Alexander from William & Mary died before Andrew was born. The surveyor Alexander may have been one of the "seven brothers". I doubt Andrew's father was educated at Edinburgh University or anywhere else. He was probably just a tobacco farmer. It would have been better if Lucinda had written nothing at all. I have seen many modern family trees based on her drivel about "the maiden of low degree" and the "trysting tree", yadda, yadda. Boyd was simply purloining the old Scottish records of the House of Drum and scrambling them all up with the House of Bonshaw, then mixed in some info from Mary Semple and we are all left with a mess. But someday, someone will part the clouds. Don't give up. Edwin