Lee,
I?d be cautious about assuming that the family in the 1851 census in Ballyreagh are yours, based solely on the naming patterns. Ballyreagh is about 25 miles from Armoy. Griffiths Valuation for the 1860s has about 40 William McNeills farming in Co Antrim, so the name is pretty common. Families in the county tended to use the same names and there was a fairly narrow pool of Christian names so you will find names repeating all over the place. The weaver/farmer aspect is also an important potential conflict of evidence.
Only a small fragment of the 1851 census has survived and so the absence of any other matching families is not significant. The portion for Armoy was destroyed.
Griffiths has another William McNeill with farmland in Aghrunniaght, in the parish of Armoy, in 1861 (he ceased to be tenant some time between 1864 and 1878). So that might be your family. There was another McNeill family nearby in Bunshannacloney, so as I say, the name is common enough in the county (reflecting the Scottish origins of the majority of the people there).
I would be inclined to search the church records for the Armoy area to see if you can find your McNeill family. Do you know what denomination they were? (The McNeill family in Bunshannacloney appear to have been Church of Ireland so it would be worth checking those records). The other likely option is Presbyterian. There is also a Reformed Presbyterian church in the area.
None of the above records are on-line, so far as I am aware. However there are copies of the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian church records in PRONI (the public record office) in Belfast. The COI records start in 1826. The Presbyterian ones in 1842. Not sure whether any Reformed Presbyterian records exist for that church at that time. (The PRONI catalogue says: ?Lists of members, baptisms, marriages and deaths for Armoy may be included included in Dervock, Ballymoney and Kilraughts register, c.1809-c.1830 ? see CR/5/32?. So you may need to look those records up if you go to PRONI.
I had a look for the Ballyreagh McNeills in Griffiths but they are not listed. However that would not be unusual. Agricultural labourers and weavers cottages of very low value were often disregarded by Griffiths clerks. They often moved around every year or so, following the work, and certainly they are gone from that townland by the time of the 1901 census. There?s a couple of McNeill burials in Clough graveyard (adjacent to Ballyreagh) but none that definitely link to that family.
The absence of pension census checks don?t necessarily mean that someone wasn?t alive in 1909. The pension census search was generated when people didn?t have satisfactory proof of their births (there were no birth certs in Ireland before 1864), but many had baptismal certs or military discharge records both of which were acceptable. It was only those without such proof where a census check was sometimes undertaken. Now that could be done by the applicant themselves. (These are the records that are on-line) but they could also be undertaken by the pension officials themselves. These other checks are not on-line. (Those for what is now Northern Ireland are held in paper format in PRONI). And the pension was means tested when it was introduced in 1909, and you also had to be of good character, so not everybody qualified anyway. So there?s a variety of scenarios in which someone over 70 might be alive but not show up in the pension census extracts.
Births and deaths from 1864 onwards in the Armoy area would appear in the civil indexes registered in Ballycastle. I searched for William McNeill deaths, registered Ballycastle 1864 to 1901. I found 8. A similar search for Mary McNeill deaths found 33 in the same period. So tricky to narrow the search to those which might be your family. However it does demonstrate how common the se names were in that small area.
Elwyn
