by Keith Bloomfield (UK)
My wife’s mother, Lillie Edith EDGAR, the eldest child of Joseph Nathaniel EDGAR and Bessie Elmslie Leys MOORE was born in Olavarria, in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 10th November 1905, and died on 11th April 1983 in Lomas de Zamora. Alfred EDGAR, whose DNA has been studied, is the son of her brother, Edward (1912-1987).
Her father, Joseph Nathaniel EDGAR, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on 5th January 1874 to Robert EDGAR and Alice MITCHELL. His working life was spent as an engineer with the Argentine Railways and it was at the little railway settlement of Las Flores that he married Bessie MOORE in 1904.
He died in Temperley, a suburb of Buenos Aires, in 1951. He had two brothers, Robert R and Alfred (both of whom were, unlike him, educated in the USA), and three sisters, Annie K, Alicia B, and Elizabeth J. Alfred died in Aurora, Illinois, USA, in 1883 at the age of 19, and Robert R in Lomas de Zamora, Buenos Aires in 1945.
Robert EDGAR, Joseph Nathaniel’s father, was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in January 1836 and baptized in Buenos Aires about four months later. His family may have moved from Uruguay to
Argentina at about that time but there was much coming and going across the River Plate in those years. In any event he married Alice MITCHELL in Buenos Aires in 1861. He died in Lomas de Zamora, a
suburb of Buenos Aires in 1915. Robert had a brother Richard who, like him, was born in Montevideo (in 1838) and baptized in Buenos Aires two months later. We have no further information.
Robert Edgar’s parents were Robert EDGAR Senior and Ann KEYS. We have few details of Robert Senior’s life apart from the fact that, like his wife, he was born in Ireland. It is known from an item in the local British community newspaper ‘The British Packet’ that he married Ann in the Scots Church Buenos Aires in 1835. He died in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1846 but his origins are uncertain. He may have arrived in the River Plate with the 1825 wave of immigrants. However, although most Irish immigrants seem to have sailed from the port of Liverpool; a group arrived via New York in 1832, so that is another possibility.
The DNA analysis of material provided by Robert Edgar’s 2xgreat-grandson, Alfred Edgar, shows a 97.7% match with that of John Edgar of British Columbia whose ancestors are known to have come from the Saintfield-Boardmills area of County Down. This very close match, albeit restricted to just one sample, indicates a common ancestry three to five generations ago in the late 1700s or early 1800s. It is therefore fairly certain that Robert came from County Down.
