Clugston, Antrim

Statutory birth registration only started in Ireland in 1864, and marriage registration in 1845, so you won’t find birth certificates for the children nor a marriage certificate for the parents. Prior to that you need to rely on church baptism & marriage records, where they survive.  Tradition was to marry in the bride’s church, after which she’d attend her husband, so the marriage and subsequent children’s baptisms are not always in the same church.

For Newtownhamilton, the early Church of Ireland records are destroyed. If the family was Presbyterian then Clarebridge has baptisms from 1822 and marriages from 1845; 1st Newtownhamilton Presbyterian has baptisms and marriages from 1833; 2nd Newtownhamilton has them from 1823. There’s a copy of the Clarebridge and Newtonhamilton 2nd records in PRONI (the public record office) in Belfast, but for the 1st church, the only copy is still held by the Minister. None of these records is on-line and so to view them you either need to go to PRONI and for the 1st you have to contact the Minister. If you google them you should get the details.

Looking at the 1901 census for Ireland, there are 178 people named Clugston.  Most were in Counties Down & Antrim. The vast majority were Presbyterian or Reformed Presbyterian, so that and the location ie the counties of Ulster points strongly to them being descendants of Scots who settled in Ireland in the 1600s. Some 100,000 Scots came to Ireland that century, representing about 10% of the entire Scottish population. The majority of the population in counties Down and Antrim are of Scottish origin, and Presbyterianism is the most common denomination there, even today. There are no records of those migrants in the 1600s, save for a handful of big landowners, whose origins in Scotland we do know.

I looked at the Muster Rolls for Co. Armagh in 1630. There were no Clugstons in the county then, so your family appear to have arrived after that. The only person of the name at the time in Ulster was a James Cloughston of Clandeboye in Down, so unless they are all descended from that one man (which strikes me as unlikely) then the migration of Clugstons post-dates that period. A lot of Scots settled in Ireland in the 1640s when General Munro’s 10,000 strong Scottish army at Carrickfergus was disbanded (and a lot of those settled around Ahoghill) but the other big migration was in the 1690s due to famine in Scotland. After 1718, Scots were starting to leave Ireland again, due to dis-satisfaction with aspect of their lives, so I'd place your family's arrival in the 1600s rather than the 1700s, based on the general trends.

Looking at the 1901 Scottish census, there were 90 people named Clugston there. Mostly spread across Lanarkshire and the southern part of Scotland, counties like Ayrshire & Dumfries. That's where most of the other Scots settlers in Ireland came from too, so no surprises there.  So that’s probably the likely area where your family may have originated. You would need DNA testing to find out though as there are no paper records in Scotland or Ireland to assist you.

KathrynB,

I can confirm that PRONI is closed at present with no date for re-opening. I would expect it to remain shut for several more months as all public buildings are closed due to Covid.

These are the records that exist for Larne Presbyterian church in the 1700s (and later years).  Where there are gaps it's because records were either never kept or have been lost over the years. The Presbyterian church in Ireland and Scotland had several schisms and reunifications in the 1700s and 1800s but the practical implication is that the Presbyterian records for Larne in the 1700s are held by what is now called the Non Subscribing Church (sometimes called Unitarian).  Details from the PRONI catalogue:

Larne  NSP 

Baptisms, 1720-69, 1796, 1801-03 and 1826-1929; marriages, 1721-69 and 1826-1908; session minutes, 1720-48, 1800-01 and 1828-30; session and committee minutes, 1864-1929; discipline cases, 1721-49; poor accounts, 1720-57.

I searched a newspaper subscription site for mention of George Clugston in the 1700s but without success. Likewise he isn’t in PRONI’s e-catalogue.

As far as finding any marriage for George, tradition was to marry in the bride’s church (after which she’d normally attend her husband’s). So you could find that any children he had may be in the above records but perhaps not his marriage (unless his bride happened to attend the same church). 

You wonder if there are any other records that might mention George.  If he was wealthy or a big landowner you might find him in the Registry of Deeds (their records are on the LDS site) but otherwise, given that he doesn’t seem to have made much impact in the newspapers, there aren’t probably many records that might mention him. Presbyterians generally didn’t keep burial records but he may have a gravestone in one of the cemeteries in Larne.

Research in Ireland in the 1700s is notoriously difficult due to the general lack of records, so you may find this fairly hard going, save perhaps for the church records. If you are unable to go to PRONI yourself, you could employ a researcher. Researchers in the PRONI area: http://sgni.net