The Doris and Travers Families

In the mid-19th. century, a large number of people came from Donegal to the West Coast of Scotland. Many Donegal people settled in the area around Greenock. Among them were a number of Doris individuals from Letter. Unfortunately, the name Dorrans was common among the Scottish population in that area and this is why almost anyone with names like Dorrian, Doran or Doris ended up being called Dorans or Dorrans in Scottish records. In other words, while the name Dorans often disguises a member of the Doris family, it can equally well stand for a number of other Irish families. In the 1840s, a Travers family from Ireland also settled in Greenock - presumably they were fleeing from the famine. In 1892 my great-grandfather Thomas Doris/Dorins married Mary Ellen Travers in Greenock. It is possible that the connection between the two families went back over a generation. In the 1861 census, two individuals called Dorans were living in the same house as the Travers family in Greenock. If this is the same Travers family, then they came originally from Co. Cork. Mary Ellen Travers was the daughter of Patrick Travers and Catherine Carr or Kerr. Patrick Travers was born in 1840 in Castletownsend near Skibbereen. His father was also called Patrick Travers. The elder Patrick died in Skibbereen workhouse in 1880, aged eighty years. His wife was called Mary Keeffe and she died in Castletownsend in 1867. These Traverses seem to have been an English family which settled in Ireland during the Munster Plantation in Elizabethan times. I have ordered some research which may help to establish if there was any connection between my great-grandmother's family and the Travers family who fled the Famine in the 1840s.