Two implied Purviances are shown in white boxes. Whether John Purviance's father is also father to Hugh Crawford's wife is a matter of probability and conjecture (see the discussion below). The three Purviances who are explicitly referred to in the "Crawfords of Donegal" [COD] are shown in the solid pink boxes:
Looking at the tree above, Hugh Crawford had only one sister (Mrs Margaret Hewet).
Fitzhugh's Dictionary of Genealogy defines brother as a term often used to mean a brother-in-law. Sometimes, to make clear which is meant, a real brother is referred to as 'my own brother'. It is therefore reasonable to take John Purviance to be Hugh Crawford's brother-in-law. Since Hugh's sister is a Mrs Hewet and not a Mrs Purviance, this leaves only two possibilities. The first and most likely is that John Purviance is the brother of Hugh Crawford's wife - which would make him a likely candidate, as a close member of the family, to be an executor to the Will. The second is that Hugh Crawford's wife (no longer necessarily a Purviance) had a sister who was married to John Purviance. With two marriages involved, the in-law relationship between Hugh and John is not so close in this case. Based on probability, the more reasonable conjecture would have Hugh's wife and John as siblings. However, the other possibility cannot be ruled out on the present evidence.
