The story
François Plunkett was born at Killummod, County Roscommon, in 1722, and entered in the 1749 Census of Elphin under the notation “Pap.” — Papist. Under the Penal Laws an Irish Catholic could not buy land, could not inherit it whole, could not take a commission, could not run a school or send a son abroad to be taught. The notation is the reason for everything that follows. He had no future in Roscommon, so he took the road other Irish Catholics took: out, to a Catholic French colony. He died at Torbeck, Saint-Domingue — the island we now call Haiti — in 1771.
Waiting on that island was the other half of this branch. Jean Baptiste Lefebvre des Hayes was baptized in Paris in 1689 at Saint-Eustache, the great church by Les Halles that is still standing. He went out to Saint-Domingue as a marine officer, rose to be aide-major of Fort Saint-Louis and then commandant of the quarter of Aquin. He married Renée Rose Le Pays, the orphaned daughter of a capitaine flibustier — a buccaneer captain. She was thirteen. She bore twenty children. François Plunkett married one of their granddaughters.
Their grandson Achilles Plunkett married Renée Rose Adélaïde Gentillot at Les Cayes du Fond on 4 May 1791. She was his cousin — both descended from the old commandant through two different daughters — and the priest said so in the register, entering a papal vicar's dispensation for consanguinity. That one clause is what let the connection be proven two hundred and thirty-five years later, on the page image of the original register.
The wedding was on 4 May 1791. On 14 August, at Bois Caïman, the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue rose — and won, and made the only successful slave revolution in history. The family ran, reaching Williamsburg and then Warrenton, North Carolina. It is worth being plain about what they were running from and what they had been: they were planters, they lost property, and the people who took it from them had a better claim to it than they did.
Then the long settle south and west: Achilles Nivison Plunkett, the first of the line born in America; William Achille Plunkett, LaGrange, Tennessee to Pulaski County, Arkansas; William Benjamin Plunkett, born at Des Arc on the Grand Prairie; and Alice Plunkett, born at Des Arc in 1893 and dead at Little Rock in 1980 — four generations from Torbeck.
The Kentucky half of the branch runs through Alice's mother, Eliza “Lila” Boyd, and a printed genealogy of 1919 corroborates the chain joint by joint: Abraham Boyd came down from Nashville by flatboat around 1800, built a horse-mill and a cotton gin at Boyd's Landing, and in 1823 the town of Canton, Kentucky was established on his land. Two of his sons are the branch's public men — Linn Boyd, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and John Boyd, a congressman of the Republic of Texas. Two young mothers' deaths shadow this side: Fannie O'Bannon, dead at nineteen just months after her daughter's birth, and Adeline Martha White, dead at eighteen right after her son arrived.