Thomas McKee & Jane Morrow

Linsa,

Tracing a marriage around 1833/1834 in Ireland can be tricky. It’s well before statutory registration of marriages started and so you have to search church records. Not every church has records for that period and of those that do, many are not on-line. (RC records mainly are but in this case it appears likely the family were not RC. Only some Protestant records are on-line, and of course quite a lot of Church of Ireland records were lost in 1922).

Tradition was to marry in the bride’s church, after which she'd usually attend her husband’s. So the marriage is not necessarily in the same church as the children are later baptised.  To complicate things further labourers, like Thomas, moved around a lot to follow the available work and so it can be very hard to track them in the records, as they often changed churches.

I have no easy answer for finding the marriage. You would need to go to PRONI in Belfast and search all the church records for that area. But that’s a lot of records.

I searched the 1901 Irish census for the surname Morrow in Co Down. There were 810, of which 141 were Church of Ireland, about 600 Presbyterian, 30 RC and the remainder were a mix of Baptists, Unitarians etc. So statistically Jane was likely to be Presbyterian but unless you know something about her background, we can’t be certain about that.

You haven’t been able to find Jane’s baptism, but the next 2 children were baptised in Bangor 2nd (Trinity). Their records start in 1829 so presumably the family was attending a different church when Jane was born. Again, it would be a matter of searching all the Presbyterian records in that area.  (That’s 20 or 30 churches, as you probably know).

Regarding Thomas’s death, death registration began in 1864. I searched the records for Newtownards registration area for 1864 – 1880. There were no adult Thomas McKee deaths. So I suspect he died before 1864 in which case there is unlikely to be any record to find. Presbyterians generally didn’t keep burial records, and if he was a labourer he’s unlikely to have had a gravestone.  I’d say it will be very difficult to trace his death.

I searched the Valuation Revision records on the PRONI website to see how long the McKees had been living in Little Francis St, and who the tenant was, as that might be a clue as to when Thomas died. However it appears that Grace only arrived there in 1880 (plot 36a) and there‘s no way of telling from those records where she and her mother lived before that.

Though most of the Irish censuses prior to 1901 have been destroyed, some fragments still exist, and I believe that Emerald Ancestors has part of the 1861 census for the area around Bangor.  You would need to verify that but if correct you might find the family in that.

Sorry that I cannot provide any more positive information.

In addition to my earlier message, I noticed that when Maxwell married in 1867 his townland (address) at that time was Gransha. I searched Griffiths Valuation 1863 and the subsequent Valuation revision records to see if there was a McKee household there. I noted 2 both headed by James McKee.  That makes me think that James McKee born 1835 had taken over as head of household, and consequently that Thomas had died before 1863. So no death certificate will exist.