Letter: Biography confirms birthplace of Ulster-Scot heroine Betsy Gray

​I thought Gordon Lucy's article (Shadowy legend of Ulster-Scot heroine Betsy Gray, August 14) on Betsy Gray was most interesting and balanced.

https://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/people/betsy-gray-fact-or-fiction-the-shadowy-legend-of-an-ulster-scots-heroine-4253451

There has always, in the past, been a controversy over where the lass was born.

However, W G Lyttle's recent biography, The Storyteller, presents the strongest possible corroboration that the author's research into her birthplace was correct in concluding that it was in the cottage at Six-Road-Ends.

In chapter 30 we read of an Irish emigrant, Mrs Sanders from Sandwich, Illinois, who had sent for a copy of Betsy Gray from W G.

Her maiden name was Macartney.

Now when Betsy and her brother were killed in 1798, Betsy's cousin, Mary Boyd, came to keep house for her uncle, Betsy's father, Hans Gray.

Mary married a George Macartney and on the death of Hans, she and George inherited the cottage.

She later became the grandmother of Mrs Sanders of Illinois.

When she had read the book, Mrs Sanders wrote to her cousin back home in Ireland, the then occupier of the cottage. (That letter has been preserved and subsequently reproduced in an appendix to the 1968 Mourne Observer edition of Betsy Gray.)

She talks about visiting the cottage as a little girl and seeing stockings and a kerchief that her grandmother had after they were taken from Betsy's dead body.

She writes, "I did not remember until I read the book that she was born in your home, but she was."

So, eyewitness proof! Much more of the background to the writing of Betsy Gray is revealed in The Storyteller.

For those interested in learning more and reading of the improbable life of the the writer of Betsy Gray, it can be found at Viewbook.at/AGLStoryteller .

A G Lyttle, Surrey