I'm just back from my annual research junket to the UK and thought I'd share a tidbit from it.
I'd long believed that the elder William Ketland, the father of Thomas Ketland Sr., was not a gunmaker although he has often been identified as such and the dates of the family's involvement with gunmaking pushed back to the 1730s or 40s. I now have incontrovertible proof that my supposition was correct. I found the elder WK's will... This means that no Ketland product can possibly pre-date about 1760 (and I've only seen one or two that were even possibly this old). The first Ketland gunmaker was Thomas Sr. and, as TK Sr. was only 22 years old and just just starting in business, it is extremely unlikely that any of his products reached the colonies as early as some have posited in the past.
