Robert?s move to Scotland would have been for employment. Tens of thousands of people moved from Ireland to Scotland in the 1800s for the same reason. 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.
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, plus regular sailings from Portrush, Ballycastle and Londonderry.
There are no migration records for movement between Ireland and Scotland. It was a domestic journey, so you were just moving from one county to another. The nearest you will probably get is from the first census that he appears in in Scotland. Most people moved when they were old enough to start work, so in this case he probably moved when he was about 17 or 18 ie c 1844. (If you have searched the 1841 Scottish census and failed to find Robert, that would tend to confirm it).
I can?t see anywhere in Antrim or elsewhere in Ireland called Piland. Nor can I think of anything similar that fits.
Birth registration only started in Ireland in 1864. Prior to that you are heavily dependent on church records but many of these are not on-line. To use them effectively you really need to know the approximate place of birth and the precise denomination. Otherwise it?s a needle in haystack.
