Land Of The Buckeye
David L. Boyd (1838 - 1919)
David L. Boyd (1838 - 1919)
David Lindsey Boyd immigrated from County Antrim, Ireland, after the end of the Civil War in the United States, to Mt. Vernon, Iowa, and was granted U.S. citizenship in 1875. We know that his parents were "James and Jenny Boyd", and that he was the youngest of a large family, and that the residence was at Spring Mount townland, in the Grange of Dundermot parish, near Clough.
Additional facts that may help lead to his ancestry:
As a younger son, farming the family land was not an option for David. In pursuit of gainful employment, he became a teacher in the National School system, where he taught at the Drumadoon school from 1857 to 1866. Samuel S. McLure, later a successful American magazine publisher, was a student of David Boyd's in Ireland. Writing in his autobiography of his early days attending a National School near his home he recalled that because he was malnourished and tired easily, he would have crying spells in the afternoon, and writes the following:
"I distinctly remember how kind the teacher, Mr. Boyd, was to me when these crying-fits came on, and how considerate the other boys were... Every few years each teacher in the public schools was required to spend six months in Dublin... I can remember when our teacher Mr. Boyd went, and how none of us much cared for the substitute... When Mr. Boyd explained to us boys that the war was between the Northern and Southern states of North America and not between North and South America, that was a great revelation to us... I have so often wondered in the intervening years what had become of this good and kindly man that I was very much pleased when Senator Brackett at the time these memoirs first appeared, wrote me, "I suspect the school teacher whom you mention in your autobiography is my old time friend David L. Boyd, still living in Mt. Vernon, Iowa." I availed myself of the hint and was rewarded by the following communication from the younger Boyd...." (a letter from David's son William W. Boyd follows in the autobiography).
- David's son William Walter Boyd took a trip in 1895 back to Ireland, and wrote a little diary. The only useful tidbits are that he went to the townland of Spring Mount, in Grange of Dundermot parish near Clough, and visited "Uncle Robert" there.
- when my father (Donald L. Boyd II) was a young boy living in northern Ohio, he remembered that his father (Donald L. Boyd I) and grandfather (James Craig Boyd) once took a trip to Tecumseh, Lenawee County, Michigan to visit "a cousin". This was probably about 1933.
- I have some information on the Boyds of Lenawee County, but I can't make a connection from it. Possibly our James Boyd was another son of the William Boyd who was the Irish progenitor of most of the early Lenawee Boyds
- I presume that our Ulster Boyds were some of the "planted" Scots during the plantation under English King James in the early 1600s, from the Boyds of Kilmarnock in Ayr. My dad remembered his grandfather had a little ditty that recited the towns in Ulster through which their immigrant ancestor travelled. The "Bally" names are difficult and foreign to us, and he couldn't remember most of them, but it ended in "Ballymena".
He was born on 5 December 1841 at County Antrim, Ireland. He was the son of James Boyd and Jenny (?). David Lindsey Boyd immigrated in 1868 to Marengo, Iowa Co., IA. He married Margaret Craig, daughter of Thomas Craig and Martha Smyth, on 8 December 1870 at Mt. Vernon, Linn Co., IA. David Lindsey Boyd died on 30 March 1919 at Mt. Vernon, Linn Co., IA, at age 77. He was buried in April 1919 at Mt. Vernon Cemetery, Mt. Vernon, Linn Co., IA.
