Why David Astor Dowdy Jr. is on this page

Heritage: Dowdy-surname carrier; the cited Wikipedia article documents no Irish ancestry. Recommend treating as a surname-carrier with no documented Irish lineage.

David Astor Dowdy Jr. (9 March 1933 – 24 April 2019) was an American businessman who, in middle and later life, became a part-time portrait sculptor whose pieces are scattered through public and private collections in the American South. After taking a Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy from the University of North Carolina in 1954 and serving in the United States Navy until his discharge in 1956, Dowdy entered business and remained there for the rest of his career. He sculpted primarily as a hobby, taking commissions from friends and business associates for portraits of men, women, children and historical and religious figures. Most are privately owned, but a number sit in institutional settings — among them an Albert Schweitzer (1966) at Duke University Medical Center’s Eye Center and a John Wesley (1990) at the First United Methodist Church of High Point, North Carolina.

Heritage notes

Family root: United States — diaspora-unconfirmed-surname-only.

The directory threads David Astor Dowdy Jr. back to the O'Dubhda clan story via the surname-variants reality — the same family carried these spellings as it scattered. See the septs and the diaspora for the wider pattern, or the Clan DNA Project for the genetic connections being mapped now.