Plunkett - Ballywatticock 1780s-1810ish

Louise,

The only Ballywatticock in Ireland that I can see is in Co. Down. I assume this is the one you are referring to. The modern Finlay’s Rd goes through the middle of it. It’s on the Ards peninsula just south of Newtownards town, not far from Mount Stewart stately home, home of the Londonderry family. See:

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/mount-stewart

There are no Plunkett households in the tithes for Newtownards parish (1825-1835) nor in Griffiths Valuation c 1860. The surname is found in the general area and there are various mentions of Plunketts attending Newtownards 1st Presbyterian church, on the Ros Davies site:

http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~rosdavies/genealogy/SURNAMES/P/PlPo.htm

Newtownards 1sts records don’t start till 1831. (If there were earlier records they have been lost).

PRONI has various Londonderry estate records which might mention your family, especially if they farmed in Ballywatticock. D654/L/E/19, for example, is a bunch of leases covering the years 1724-1744. If you search the PRONI e-catalogue for Ballywatticock you will find other references to the townland.

https://apps.proni.gov.uk/eCatNI_IE/SearchResults.aspx

If the family were farmers, you could also search the Registry of Deeds records in PRONI looking for any leases involving them and Ballywatticock. (The PRONI staff will show you how to do that).

Research in Ireland for the 1700s is notoriously difficult due to the general lack of records.

 

 

Louise,

In Griffiths Valuation of 1863 there were about 22 farms in Ballywatticock plus about 30 farm labourers cottages spread across the farms.

In the 1901 census there were 126 people living in a total of 35 houses. There was a post office clerk a druggists apprentice, carpenter, stonemason, collector of rates, a retired soldier and a clerk. Pretty well everyone else was engaged in farming or related activities eg weaving. So it was essentially a rural agricultural area. It still is today except that there are more houses there now and a lot of people who live there commute to work in Newtownards, Bangor or Belfast.

Mechanisation of both farms and weaving throughout the 1800s meant that the need for farm labourers & weavers fell away dramatically. Consequently most of the labourers cottages would have been abandoned and eventually pulled down.  This lack of farm work for labourers, and a lack of alternative employment in new industries, was one of the many reasons people emigrated from Ireland in the 1800s. Ireland has very few natural resources like coal, or precious metals and so the industrial revolution largely passed it by. Folk had to emigrate.