The island of Ireland has had a turbulent history much before the
vikings invaded and settled on the island. It had once been a
rugged tree covered wind-swept land in the north Atlantic.
Successive populations cut the trees for firewood, timber for ships and
buildings without allowing for regrowth to cover the
demands. Further clearing of the land for crops that had to
hold their place in the thinning or rocky soil frequently eroded
anything that remained. The introduction of sheep grazing
exacerbated the problems of the short growing season and wet
climate. The one crop that seemed to grow particularly well here
was
the exotic south American plant of the potato which became a prominent
crop after the 1600's. The seventeenth century Ireland "was
utterly wretched, and broken-hearted. Its agriculture was
miserable, and chronic scarcity alternated with actual famine; it had
little commerce, and no manufacturers, save the slowly increasing linen
manufacture of Ulster." [Hanna 621]
Around the 1600's Dublin had a population of about thirty
thousand. The Provence of Ulster in Northern Ireland had no
single town with more than five thousand people. The
scarcity of people also made immigration to Ireland a good destination
for cheap help needed for the large English plantations under
development. It also was a good way to get rid of the trouble
making Scots who refused to obey the kings commands. Although
Charles I was trying to re-establish the Catholic church in England in
the mid-1600's, Cromwell takes over the government and has
Charles executed in 1649. The Presbyterians that had been
fighting so fiercely in Scotland against Charles I now in Northern
Ireland came out opposing the death penalty and the tyrannical methods
of Cromwell. John Milton who was a sworn Covenant, was angry at
the Westminister Assembly for condemning his dangerous doctrine of
divorce. "He published a reply to the Presbyterian protest when
he calls Belfast a "barbarous nook of Ireland," and exhibiting "as much
devilish malice, impudence and falsehood as any Irish rebel could have
uttered and would judge them to be "a generation of Highland thieves
and red-shanks."
King William dies in 1702 and was succeeded by Anne, the daughter of
James. She was a tried and true Tory and interested in
invoking revenge on the Presbyterians and Covenanters for her father's
death. The Presbyterians were somewhat protected by the
reigning power of the Whigs who saved the dissenters. By this
time the Irish Presbyterian Church congregations numbered one hundred
and twenty. They were divided into nine areas of Belfast, Down,
Antrim, Coleraine, Armagh, Tyrone, Monaghan, Derry, and Convoy.
[Hanna 617]
Queen Anne introduced the bill "to prevent the further growth of
Popery" in Ireland. It contained many clauses which were focused
against the Roman Catholics in direct violation of the Treaty of
Limerick. One was that all public officials had to take the
Sacrament according to the rites of the Episcopal Church. The
Presbyterians assented to the demands because they had few seats in
parliament or official standing anywhere. The bill was passed 4
March 1704 besides the Catholic restrictions it also excluded
Presbyterians from the magistracy, customs, excise, post-office, courts
of law, and municipal offices. So not only were
Presbyterians denied positions of law and influence but also minor
governmental offices that afforded at least a small continuous source
income for their families. "Some Presbyterians residing in
Lisburn were excommunicated by the Episcopal authority for the crime of
being married by ministers of their own church." They were also forced
to pay tithes to the Episcopal church that they never attended and
whose beliefs they never adhered. In spite of this the
Presbyterian churches continued to thrive. [Hanna 618]
In 1710 the Duke of Ormond took over the government. He
exerted his power to appoint primates and commander of forces to be
Lords Justices. A recently passed law which was used against the
Roman Catholics now was forced on the Presbyterians. This
was the infliction of severe penalties for refusing to take the
Abjuration Oath. The law came down on the Rev. Alexander
McCracken, of Lisburn, in 1713. Mr. McCracken was fined five
hundred pounds and condemned to six month in prison but because he
refused to swear an oath stayed in prison for two years after George
was crowned king in 1716. School teachers were imprisoned
for up to three months and doors of Presbyterian churched were "nailed
up".
The emigration from Ulster is a remarkable feature of Irish
history. The Scots who came to Ireland were looking for better
opportunities for themselves and their families. There was no
loyalty of the Presbyterians to the ruling groups of Ireland.
They left Ulster in crowds. Whole families and congregations of
churches, including the ministers, migrated at one time. In 1728,
Archbishop Boulter states that "above 4200 men, women and children have
shipped off from hence for the West Indies, with three years," The
"West Indies" was another word for the American colonies. A
famine struck in 1739-40 during which time about 400,000 starved to
death. Continuing the emigration cycle "several years
afterwards, twelve thousand emigrants annually left Ulster for the
American plantations", From 1771 to 1773 about thirty thousand
emigrants left Ulster which included ten thousand weavers.
Accounting for the increases in population from 1731-1768 the number of
emigrates that went to North America in this period was proportional to
one third of the entire Protestant population of Ireland. [Hanna
622]
The deprivation of the land and the people of Northern Ireland is
recorded in a number of documents in the Public Records of Northern
Ireland. One quote from the Murray papers gives at least some
clues from the perspective of the land owner by James Hamilton in
1728-29,
America or stories of America brought thousands of immigrants from
both Northern and Southern Ireland. By the mid-1700's a thousand
wagons of Irish a year were making their way from Pennsylvania down
into North Carolina. One letter from John Dunlap, who was
responsible for the printing of the Declaration of Independence, wrote
on 12 May of 1785 to his brother-in-law in Ireland, "People with a family advanced in life
find great difficulties in emigration, but the young men of Ireland who
wish to be free and happy should leave it and come here as quick as
possible. There is no place in the world where a man meets so
rich a reward for good conduct and industry as in America."
[PRONI, emigration series:1] Many of the familes in my background were
part of this group which
is largely known as the Scotch-Irish. They were forced out of
Scotland and then forced out of North Ireland through economic and
religious inequities. Because the records of Ireland
have been decimated by the English event of burning the cenus records
in 1922, it is very difficult, if not impossible to track the families
back to the 1600's. Although I have a number of relatives that
have Scottish names I can't prove when or where they originated.
We know they continued a religious tradition that would have been
outlawed in Ireland and England. We have been able to identified by DNA
that the Graydon family in South Carolina is associated with the
Graydons of Canada and have origins in Fermanagh Co., N.
Ireland.[Graydon DNA project] The records of Freeholders there give us
a pretty good idea about this family. Other families that did not
hold land and may have worked as serfs have no records to trace.
The Spann family seems to be the only
one that came from southern Ireland. The fact that several
Span/Spann
were educated in Trinity College in Dublin indicates to me that Rev.
Benjamin Spann and his sons were part of the English colonizaton of
Southern Ireland. See the following families for their
lives.
- Family Members -
Northern Ireland
(proved or suspected immigrants) - Bothwell, Burns,
Campbell, Jones,
McDowell, Renwick,
Graydon
Southern Ireland
- Spann
Source:
Return to Pedersen Index || Return to Elroy's Family Index || Ancestoral Chart #2
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