1788 Murray/Murry, Bernard

The O’Neill family are a native Irish family who held lands in Co Antrim prior to the Plantation. They have been in the area since at least the 1200s. They had their lands reconfirmed to them by King James I and they have remained there ever since. So they were the main landlord in the area for hundreds of years. The current Lord O’Neill still lives in Shane’s Castle to this day.

I am not sure about your information that the O’Neill estate records were destroyed in a fire at the castle in 1922.  There was a fire in 1816 which burned the castle down but I have not heard of one in 1922. (There was however a fire at the Public Record Office in Dublin in 1922 which destroyed many records held there. Possibly some wires have got corssed). But in any event there are some tenant records for Shane’s Castle still in existence.

PRONI (the public record office in Belfast) holds two documents you might want to look at. T1024/1 are the tenants by townland in 1829 and T1024/2 are the same records for 1831. So you would be able to see any Murray farms at that time. However the records wouldn’t show any agricultural labourers or weavers etc who would be sublet from the main farms. So you need to know whether your family were farmers or not, for those records to be of much use.

There is a history of the RC parish (“Sweet Drummaul” by Patrick O’Kane 1991). I had a quick look at it but did not see any particular references to Murray in the congregation in the early 1800s. The book does tell me that there was no RC burying ground in the parish till 1848, so prior to that your ancestors would have been buried in Church of Ireland burial grounds or perhaps in Cranfield graveyard. There is also a graveyard in Shane’s Castle demesne which has graves back to the 1700s. It was for the O’Neill family and for tenanst who lived close to the castle. It’s not been used since 1798. The book lists the gravestones in there. No Murrays. There is another graveyard at Milltown. There’s a Richard Murray 1877 there. But it’s quite important to realise that the vast majority of the population couldn’t afford gravestones and so were buried without one. There are no burial records from the 1700s and 1800s.

The Ordnance Survey Memoirs for Drummaul (1838) mention Martha Murray aged 18 who emigrated to New York in 1836 but she was Presbyterian. (Murray is a common name in the area as you may have discovered). The memoirs comment: ”Those who have emigrated for the past 3 years were chiefly labourers and small farmers, with a few tradesmen, who could command little or no capital, but emigrated to seek in a foreign land that comfort their own country no longer affords. All good characters.” (The actor John Wayne’s family were amongst those who emigrated from the town. His birth surname was Morrison and they originated in Randalstown).

For general background reading on life in the area around the early 1800s, both the OS Memoirs and “Sweet Drummaul” give a good flavour. But I do not know of any earlier RC baptism records than those already in PRONI and on the National Library site.

Carolyn,

The Freeholder Lists are lists of those with a vote. To be eligible to vote in the later 1700s you needed to be male, have land of above a certain value (£2 rental per year) and, until 1792 be Protestant. Only a tiny percentage of the population had that amount of land (less than 5%) so though useful if you had family with land, the vast majority of migrants families won’t be listed in the Freeholders lists.

If Bernard went to Scotland to work in the mines, then that economic profile indicates to me he almost certainly came from a labouring/weaving background and not that of comparatively well off farmers, so you wouldn’t expect to find them in the freeholder lists. Nor would you expect to find him in the O’Neill estate records at PRONI that I mentioned previously. They list all the farmers townland by townland, but the agricultural labourers and weavers are not listed there. (They sublet from the farmers and not from the O’Neills) and in general no records exist for them for the late 1700s and early 1800s.

Regarding Bernard’s religious denomination, I’d be very surprised if he wasn’t RC. It’s a forename mostly only found in RC families in Ireland. I looked at the 1901 census for Ireland. There are 17,213 people named Bernard. 16,843 are RC.

There were very few passenger lists for migrants from the UK to Canada before 1850 (the authorities in Canada didn’t need them) so if Bernard’s family migrated from Scotland to Nova Scotia c 1841 there probably won’t be a passenger list to locate. There were separate sailings from Glasgow and from Liverpool. I haven’t come across many vessels that went from Liverpool to Glasgow and then on to Canada. Vessels from Liverpool and Glasgow did however often stop in Ireland, especially in Moville, in Co Donegal to pick up extra passengers. But if he was living in Scotland, I’d just expect him to have sailed directly from there.

Regarding Scottish mining records, you can try this website:

http://nationalminingmuseum.com

Regarding mining in Ireland, by and large there wasn’t any, that’s why people went to Scotland or England to work instead. Ireland has very few natural resources, a key factor in emigration for over 200 years. Therefore it didn’t benefit from the industrial revolution and so people had to leave and go to where there was work. With the exception of very small quantities of coal along the Antrim coast and some in the Leitrim area there isn’t any coal in Ireland. There was also tiny amounts of mining for iron ore and the like but these employed very small numbers. So hardly any miners in Ireland. In contrast, Scotland and England is/was full of coal, so tens of thousands of Irish labourers went there to work. (But, in general, they would not have been miners in Ireland. They would have learned the trade in Britain.).