This work is the product of over forty years interest in the origins of the Orr family. Research of an old family story—a relationship to William Orr, an Irish Patriot executed in 1798—led to research of the origin of the Orr families in Ulster, and the early Scottish settlers on the Montgomery estates, County Down, in 1606. These people came from the west of Scotland—Ayrshire and Renfrewshire—where there have been Orrs since about AD 1300. Subsequent research suggests that the family originated from the ancient Parish of Urr in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. Mainly of the Presbyterian denomination, the Orrs in Scotland and settlers in Ulster were subject to religious discrimination and were among the tens of thousands of Ulster Scots (the Scotch-Irish) who migrated to the far corners of the British Empire in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nearly 100,000 Orr descendants are today spread across the United States of America, with thousands more in Australia, Canada, Malta, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, and the West Indies. As well as researching the origins and distribution of the family name, a detailed examination was made of the "Orrs at War" where many hundreds lie in foreign fields, having died in the service of their country. That the Orrs were achievers is illustrated in factual stories of inventors, patriots, and founders of former frontier towns and cities that bear the Orr name. Included are a selection of some old Orr families with indexed ancestor and descendant reports, and a selection of Orrs with a "claim to fame." The sixteen appendices include details of Orrs buried in Greyfriars Kirk (Edinburgh, Scotland) in the seventeenth century; Orr marriages about the time of the Montgomery settlement; Pallot's English marriages, and the 1881 Census, of England, Scotland and Wales. Numerous photographs and a full name index enhance the text.
Brian J. Orr
2006, 5.5" x 8.5", paper, index, 376 pp.
ISBN: 9780788442667
101-O4266
