Sandra,
I wouldn’t worry too much about the discrepancies in the ages on the death certificate and gravestone. Obviously at least one of them has to be wrong, and in this case they are probably both wrong. The information on death certificates was just the informant’s best guess. No documentation was required when registering a death and in the 1800s people generally didn’t celebrate birthdays and had little clear idea of how old they actually were. Gravestones were even worse. They were usually erected some years after the burial and again the age was often just a stab in the dark. (I notice in your case the date of death is also wrong by a day). By way of example, I have attached a letter from someone in 1908 who was writing to his Minister, for proof of age. All he knew was that he was between “70 and 78 years of age.” It shows that the writer had only the vaguest idea of his age. Couldn’t narrow it down to within 9 years. (The reason for the letter was that the old age pension was being introduced in 1909 for people aged 70 and over. Documentary proof of age was required. Thus, probably for the first time in his life, his age became relevant to him).
You will already have noticed how people didn’t bother how their name was spelled and so there are umpteen variations of Scriminger in your family. Indifference or ignorance of an exact age really just mirrors this. It wasn’t something the average person concerned themselves much about.
Most women married around 21 so my guess is that if the 1860 marriage is correct, Matilda was born around 1838/1840. You could search the church records for that baptism but I do know that not all the churches in Ahoghill have records that go back that far. The Church of Ireland does, and you can certainly search them in PRONI in Belfast, but Matilda may not necessarily have been of that denomination when she was born. (The most common denomination in Ahoghill was and still is Presbyterian). Ahoghill 1st Presbyterian church’s baptisms start in 1841, the 2nd’s in 1835 and the 3rds do not start till 1859. (Earlier records were lost or never kept). Tradition was to marry in the bride’s church, so you might want to check the 1860 marriage cert. If they married in St Colmanell’s then she probably was COI and that would be where I would look first for her baptism.
Non RC Marriages were entered into the statutory records from 1845 onwards. I have checked the records for the Ballymena area from 1845 to 1875 and the only marriage for a Matilda Canning to a Scrimager was the one I found in 1860. (There was a Matilda Canning who married a Holmes in Antrim town in 1865. That was the nearest). Likewise I found no marriage between Matilda Buchanan and a Scrimager (or variant). Matilda Buchanan is a comparatively rare name and there were only about 4 in Ireland around that time.
Ahoghill is not a big place. (Pop today is about 3400). According to the Ordnance Survey memoirs, in 1837, around the time Matilda was probably born, there were just 109 houses in the village. With that in mind, the Scrimager-Canning family we have located contains 7 of the 8 children you named in your first message. (Only Matthew has yet to be located). You appear to have firm proof your family came from Ahoghill. How likely is it, in a village of 109 houses, that there would be another family with children with identical names (and who had also conveniently left Ahoghill by 1901)? It seems to me pretty likely that this is your family. Matilda may well have had a middle name Buchanan but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was her mother’s maiden name. Middle names can come from other sources (my own certainly does).
You are correct that Ballymena is close to Ahoghill. Just a couple of miles at most. You should have no difficulty in finding the street where the Scrimager family lived. As I mentioned previously, the family appear to have lived at the back of the row of houses that faces Church St. You might want to go into the pub car park, as I did, to get an idea of where it was. If you look at the house and building return on the 1901 census, you’ll see that your family’s home had 2 to 4 rooms, a roof made of slates or tiles and had 3 windows at the front (which means rear here). Landlord was John Hamill, who leased the whole block of cottages. They would have worked from home and sold their linen at Ballymena market.
The church and churchyard is just up the street about a 2 minute walk. Go in the entrance gate and bear left. There is a path that takes you around the church and down the graveyard. Go down there towards the yew trees at the bottom. The grave is facing away from you, as you go down, so you will need to go to the trees and search there. I found it in a minute. You can use the photo I sent to help locate it.
As you know, according to the 1901 census, your family were linen weavers. (If you want to see what their house would have looked like inside, there is a weavers cottage c 1900 in the Folk & Transport museum in Cultra, just outside Belfast). See:
http://nmni.com/Home/Online-Collections.aspx?Cat=-1&SubCat=-1&SubSubCat=-1&CatalogId=&Term=weavers%20cottage&AdvSearch=TRUE
I have also attached a photograph of some hand loom weavers in Ahoghill. Taken from the Irish Textile Journal of 15th September 1888. Perhaps your ancestors are in the photo? Who knows? If you are interested in learning more about Ahoghill, go to the local studies section in Ballymena library. (Local studies is upstairs). There are racks of local books, and the librarian has files and cuttings on specialist subjects such as local weaving etc.
Mechanised mills eventually killed off hand loom weaving. They were much more efficient and generally made better quality cloth. It survives today in one or two specialist sources eg Harris Tweed in the Outer Hebrides which has to be made on a hand loom machine to be allowed to call itself Harris Tweed. But otherwise the skill and business has disappeared. The spinning mills also employed only women and children (cheaper and nimbler fingers) so the men lost their jobs whilst new ones were created for women giving them considerable empowerment for the first time in history. They were no longer dependent on their father or husband for every penny.
As things stand at present I won’t be around to meet you in Ahoghill. I will be away in Edinburgh for a few days. I fly over there on the 8th April and return to Co. Antrim on the afternoon of the 14th. So unless you can juggle your dates slightly, I don’t think our paths will cross. Unfortunately I am the only volunteer in this part of Ireland and so don’t have a colleague I can ask to step in.
