Looking for relatives of John McChesney 1764

There are a number of Presbyterian churches near Clontibret. Monaghan 1st has records from 1821, 2nd from 1802, Clontibret 1st from 1825, Clontibret 2nd from 1858. Cahans has records for 1751-59 and from 1767 onwards. There are another 3 in the Killylea area of Armagh but none has records for the 1700s. In short it doesn’t appear that any Presbyterian church in the area has records for 1764. Nearly all start 50 or more years later.

Possibly DNA testing is the only way you might trace the family, by matching with someone who has more information on the family’s origins.

Donn,

I used the PRONI guide to church records for the information I gave based on your mention of Clontibret and Killylea. I am curious to know which other churches in those places have earlier records, as that might be useful in the future.

There are a handful of churches across Ireland with records for the 1600s and 1700s but most either didn’t keep them or lost them due to fire (a lot of Church of Ireland records were lost in the 1922 fire in the Public Record Office in Dublin), carelessness, weather damage, or general neglect. Some have notes telling us that no earlier records were kept. Clearly many didn’t regard it a top priority, and no-one seems to have lost much sleep over it. For example, there’s a note in the Drumgooland Church of Ireland records in the Public Record Office in Belfast (MIC1/40), dated 1st Feb 1779, which says: “A marriage and some baptisms prior to the record of this book with the utmost submission inserted here for this reason that this parish had no register book kept in it before, as far as can be remembered.” Also: “The entries of baptisms from this date 2nd Jun 1833 were made from papers collected by me J. A. Bears, lying about the church and vestry room and put in this book after I received it from Thos I. Tighe at Parsons Hill on my becoming curate of the parish 1837.”

This general lack of records pre 1800 is why much Irish research comes to a stop around that time. It's very difficult to find any type of record, unless your family was very wealthy or notorious in some way.

 

There was doubt about the validity of Presbyterian marriages until 1844 (when a new Marriage Act clarified the law), and much discussion about it in the press and elsewhere, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say they were prohibited from marrying. There were a couple of prosecutions in the 1600s (during the papal law times) of Presbyterian Ministers conducting marriages but from the late 1600s onwards Presbyterians did routinely marry in their own denomination. There are Presbyterian marriage registers from the 1600s. Just not many. Examples are Antrim 1st whose marriage records start in 1675 & Lisburn which start in 1689. There are more for the 1700s but again not that many. So Presbyterians were routinely married by their own Ministers at that time. Where people sometimes married in the Church of Ireland was if it was a mixed marriage, or if there was significant property involved, with inheritance implications. Marrying in the Church of Ireland therefore removed any question mark over inheritance. But obviously that really only affected wealthy people. The average farmer or labourer wasn’t troubled by that aspect.

There were a number of reasons for migration in the 1700s. Religious restrictions were a factor but there were more important economic drivers too. There had been a series of bad harvests all through the 1700s (due to bad weather), farmers couldn’t buy their land and so were forced to lease. Rents were rising, and there were restrictions on the linen trade caused partially by English protectionist legislation restricting the sale of Irish linen and cotton, and then during and following the American War of Independence it wasn’t possible to import cotton from America for a while (which ultimately led to a significant increase in linen production because flax will grow in Ireland when cotton won’t) but which in the shorter term affected the Irish economy. The population was also expanding significantly. It went up from 3 million in 1741 to 8 million in 1841. (It’s only 6 million today). There just weren’t the jobs for all those people. They had to leave to find work. So religious restrictions would have annoyed and offended Presbyterians but probably weren’t on their own enough to lead to widespread migration. The socio-economic position was the main driver.

I have attached a talk which I found in PRONI’s records which sets out the background in a bit more detail. It was delivered in the 1920s but fortunately the manuscript has survived. Though focused on Co. Antrim much of the material in it is relevant to the economic situation and public feeling in Monaghan in the 1700s too.