Thanks, Sue. The internet is indeed a strange world, where something like that is considered naughty. Anyway, here's another attempt to share the full text of my message, naughty bit excised.

In an old file I found a newsletter from a second cousin that was sent to me when we were in the midst of moving to New Zealand 10 years ago. I had filed it and forgotten it. Unfortunately the second cousin died while we were away.

At the back of his newsletter was a printout from the Manx Notebook of a long (24-page) account by my great-great grandfather Philip’s nephew Thomas of his understanding of the Ballakinnag Tear family history. It was written in 1888 when he was an old man living in Painesville, Ohio.

Here’s the link to Thomas’s account: www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/famhist/genealgy/ttaccnt.htm

Genealogist, Jane Southwick, found quite a few errors in his account, but it is nevertheless a treasure-trove of information about life at Ballakanag (his spelling) in the early 1800s. Although it’s a bit disjointed and therefore hard to follow, he reports that Philip Tear’s first wife Elinor Caine died a few weeks after their wedding. Philip later married Margaret Quirk, and they had a daughter, also named Margaret. They lived at Ballakanag.

In the 1820s, apparently, the entire family decided to sell the farm and move to the state of Ohio in America because they were having financial woes. Due to a dispute between Philip and his father, though, the son and his family decided to leave early. However, the ship they sailed on foundered at sea and all hands and passengers were rescued by a passing Canadian boat, which took everyone to St. John, New Brunswick. There were numerous attempts to communicate between the IOM family and the Tears in New Brunswick, but as far as Thomas knew they were never reunited. Two years after Philip and his family left the farm for the new world, the rest of the clan sailed successfully for Ohio.

One note of interest to the Tear descendants here, who have always been told Philip (he has always been known as Richard to them) was a son of aristocracy who had married a servant girl and was banished to Canada: confusion could have arisen from the fact that Thomas’s great-uncle William was known “while young and long after, the Lord Bog (sic Beg), or ‘little lord,’" he reports.

He continues, “Now back to the family of Tears, of Ballakanag, who were distinguished from the other Tears by the name of ‘Lord,’ it was seldom, or never used in English, or in writing, but they were seldom called anything else in their own language, it is not used as a title, though it had that form, and it had been in use, so long, that no one could tell what the origin of it was. It was said that in olden time, they had held some office under the Lord of the Manor, and that in some way, it arose from that.”

I would be overjoyed to know more about Philip Tear and his family in New Brunswick, and later, Nova Scotia.