I see a marriage for Elizabeth McCart to James McClean registered in Lurgan 11.9.1862. If you view that certificate it should give you Jane’s father’s name and occupation as well as a townland (address) all of which may help decide whether it’s the family you are interested in. The above marriage was evidently either a Registry Office or a Protestant ceremony. You can view the original certificates on-line on the GRONI website, using the “search registrations” option:
https://geni.nidirect.gov.uk
You will need to open an account and buy some credits. It costs £2 (sterling) to a view a certificate.
Tradition was to marry in the bride’s church which should be on the certificate, (unless it was a Registry Office marriage). That church may be the place to look for her baptism and that of any siblings.
You ask why your ancestors didn’t just go straight to Australia. I obviously can’t answer that specifically but I would think that the answer may be that when they first left Ireland they didn’t intend going to Australia. Scotland was probably seen as likely to provide all they needed in the way of work and a better life. He evidently reconsidered that after a period working there. Another factor might have been that when he left Ireland he may not have been able to afford the fare to Australia.
One of Ireland’s problems is a lack of natural resources. There’s no coal, oil, iron ore etc, and so apart from a modest amount of shipbuilding in Belfast and the Belfast linen mills (which mostly only employed women), it did not really get the industrial revolution that benefited England and Scotland where mills, steelworks, ship building, coal mining and all their support industries were major employers creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Much better paid than subsistence farming or weaving. Added to that you had the effects of a massive population explosion in Ireland – up from 3 million in 1750 to 8 million in 1841 (no-one is really sure of the reasons why but reduced neo-natal deaths seem to be a factor) and the famine. So some push factors and some pull factors saw huge numbers of people leave Ireland. Something like 2 million people emigrated from Ireland in the 1800s.
Huge numbers went to Scotland. If you look at the Scottish censuses for the Glasgow area in the late 1800s, you will see that about every fifth person recorded there was born in Ireland. Scotland was a particularly popular place to go to work because it was easy and very cheap to get to. Several sailings every day from Belfast. The shipping companies main business was cargo and the passengers were just top-up revenue. Competition was fierce and passenger fares very low. People working in Scotland could come home for weddings or the harvest, as well as holidays. You could also send children back to stay with their grandparents, thereby leaving the wife free to work. You couldn’t do all those things so easily from Australia, America or Canada. For further background on Irish migration to Scotland, see this link:
http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/higherscottishhistory/migrationandempire/experienceofimmigrants/irish.asp
A certain proportion of those who went to Scotland (and England) later migrated again, most commonly to the USA but also to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Stepped migration like that was quite common. The money earned in Scotland or England also made it easier to pay the more expensive fares for the longer migration.
