Hi Peggy,
I'll try to help out if I can. I was at one time in touch with a man name Derrick Porter who has an extensive database of Plucks and Pluckroses. He lives in Sussex, England, and you can check out his website at
http://www.pluckrose.org/ where he goes into detail about his search for ancestors, and how the name was originally Pluckrose, but started to be shortened to Pluck in the 1600s.
It's interesting that you have the same name as my great- grandmother, Margaret Pluck, who married my great - grandfather John Kennedy in 1878 in Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire), County Dublin, Ireland.
There are three things to keep in mind about the Plucks:
1) Pluck is an extremely rare and ususualy name, and I have had very little response to most of my queries about them, due to the fact that there aren't many (as Derrick Porter told me, they are "as rare as hen's teeth") . He can be reached at:
pluck@one-name.org2) You will find that the vast majority of whatever Plucks there have been over the hundreds of years that Derrick has been researching came from the Cambridge/ Essex border area of England, and later spread out a bit, but are still concentrated in the Cambridge general area. He has found that the name was originally Pluckrose and was shortened in the 1600s to Pluck. He has a vast database of the few Plucks with all their descendants throughout the years.
3.) My Plucks belonged to the Irish Plucks, who were in County Wicklow since at least 1580, and who in the mid-1800s still numbered 11 families in Ireland, all in County Wicklow or just to the north in (Kingstown, mainly), County Dublin. Eleven families is not a lot with that name, for the whole country. As Derrick told me "... the fact that Plucks could be found in Ireland as far back as 1580 would tend to suggest that Irish Plucks might not be descended from Pluckroses as are the English Plucks".
So, with these in mind, I guess it's important to try and determine whether your Plucks had English or Irish origins. One thing that might be helpful would be the religion. The Irish Plucks were Roman Catholic.
Now with emigration, etc., some could have changed religious affiliation, but chances are that if yours are Protestant, they would have originated in England, if Roman Catholic, in Ireland.
I have found a lot more information now on my Plucks, and would be willing to share this with you if you want to contact me a
jtliebzeit@shaw.ca.
I'm not prepared to put all the information I have out on a messageboard, as there wouldn't be many reading it, and it would be extremely time-consuming (and take up a ton of space as well).
Jane