One of the readers of my Genealogy Blog, Mr Atakan Orkun from Turkey, recently sent me a very interesting e mail. Mr Orkun told me a great story that it was tradition in his family that he was descended from a son of Marshal Patrice MacMahon the nineteenth century French war hero and President of the Third Republic. The Marshal's son was said to have worked as a doctor in Ottoman Europe and married a Bosnian girl Bosnali Gullu, before adopting the Turkish name Dr Jeyan Akif bey. This was an intriguing story so I decided to look into it for Mr Orkun.