Fib, My great, great, great, grandfather was John Moore, whose family was apparently driven out of Scotland after being caught on the wrong side of a Catholic/Protestant tiff. He shows up in Newtonards, as one of the builders of the Masonic Lodge in that town, and (from Lodge records still kept there) was a secretary at the lodge taking dues on July 4, 1775. He also is carried as one of the builders of the Presbyterian Church there. He lost several relatives, including at least one wife and a son who are buried in the abandoned churchyard at Morvilla (there are a great number of Moores buried there, hence the name?). John left Ireland and went to Nova Scotia where he built another Presbyterian Church, leaving two mill stones from his mill as the front steps to the church. He is buried there, and the rest of the family continued as millers, eventually moving to Boston in the 1840's where they became "Lace Curtain Irish" until the Great War and the Depression moved the family into the military as the career path of most of the sons.

Although no one in the family has been a Mason for many years, the Masons in Newtonards apparently gave John a document call a "Di Mit" which was a sort of character reference to show the Masons in the new world. This old document and a pair of jackplanes were the only thing we had to go on, in tracking him down. A documents examiner in Trinity College was able to make out the lodge marking on a lamp black seal on the document, that was unreadable to any of us, and the game was afoot. As an ex-cop I had told my Dad that we would track 'ol John to ground, if Dad lived through the heart attack he had a couple of years ago. Thus, two years ago my brother John, ('ol John's namesake) my father and I ended up near the ruins of a long abandoned church, looking at row upon row of Moores. When my Dad finally does go, he and his sons will have said it all...