Interesting development on this liitle dirk. On the guard is a named etched faintly into it marked "Ohaoda". This threw me at first, but knowing that it came from an Irish estate, I did some research and turned up the Gaelic name AHaoda as the equivilent of "Hughes". Turns out that when i contacted the seller, that was his family name (he had never even seen the tracing as it is so faint. I had to use a magnifier to see it). Perhaps a little research might turn up something, but I'm guessing from the small hilt that he was a mid-shipman (who, in the Brit and Amer navies of the time, could be as young as 10!) probably during the 1810-30 period.
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