Richard Stannells ***

Richard Stannells (c.1575–1620) stands among the earliest figures recorded in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, occupying the position of a twelfth great-grandparent. His surname is marked in the family register with an asterisk, indicating that the connection rests upon an unverified Ancestry hint rather than upon a confirmed documentary record; readers of the archive are therefore asked to regard the particulars that follow as provisional, awaiting further corroboration.

According to the available record, Richard was born about the year 1575 in a place rendered as Stannillis, in the vicinity of Belfast, County Antrim, in the north of Ireland. The orthography of the place is suggestive of the loose and variable spellings common to that age, when surnames and townland names alike were committed to paper by clerks working from spoken pronunciation. He is said to have died in 1620 in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, on the western coast of Scotland.

The movement implied between these two points — from Ulster to Ayrshire — is consistent with the well-attested traffic of persons across the narrow North Channel during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In that period the Plantation of Ulster drew Lowland Scots into the north of Ireland, while families of Scots descent crossed back and forth between Antrim and Ayrshire with a frequency that often blurred the two communities into one. A man born in Antrim and laid to rest in Kilmarnock would have been wholly unremarkable in such an age.

Only one child is recorded for Richard in the present register: a daughter, Margaret Stannillis, who died in 1626, and through whom the line of descent continued toward the compiler.

No occupation, religious affiliation, spouse, or further family detail is preserved in the archive at this time. Richard Stannells was the compiler's twelfth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.