Hi Lindsay,
This is Susan/subythec from the first entry above. I've been researching your family for a long time but have not any information further back than you've found. The following is a summary I wrote a while ago about what I've found about the origins of the Kyte family. (Father John Boyd Kyte is your second cousin 2x removed. George William Kyte is your first cousin 3x removed.)
The original home in Ireland and history of the Kyte ancestors before immigrating to North America is not yet documented to my knowledge; however, there are several different possibilities that have been raised by family members.
Some say without a doubt the Kyte history dates back to Oliver Cromwell's conquest of Ireland between 1649 and 1653. Cromwell subjugated and plundered the Irish and then made confiscated land available to his soldiers and supporters as payment or reward and as a way to keep the Irish in line.
The 1746 Battle of Culloden in Scotland was the last great battle before the English conquered Scotland. There was a tomb with the name KYTE on it. The Scots buried their dead according to clan. Thus the Kyte name may be Scottish in origin. Some family members say this would fit well with the appearance of an English soldier named Kyte in Silvermines, County Tipperary, Ireland. They say it was the habit of the English to conscript Scots into their army after the conquest of their homeland. Besides being good soldiers, it helped break up the clans. Also the Kyte ancestor may have been an ordinary mercenary hired for service in a foreign army. I don’t know the source of the information about the English soldier in Silvermines.
Father John Boyd Kyte (1891-1977) is the first to my knowledge to document the family history from personal conversations with his grandfather who was one of the immigrants as a child, original church records in his native Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada and a visit to Ireland in 1950. He states in his 1976 letter to American family members that the family originated in Silvermines, County Tipperary, Ireland.
We visited County Tipperary and Silvermines in 2006 in search of family history. There are documented Kyte family members living in Silvermines (historically known as Bellagowan) until the mid-1900s. The Silvermines parish church and the Tipperary County history center did not have records back far enough to link those Kytes with our Kyte immigrants to Nova Scotia in about 1825, let alone back to the 1600s or 1700s. The earliest Kyte birth that I found in the parish records was 1841. No one from the family was living in Silvermines when we visited. Father Kyte may have talked to them during his visit in 1950. I was put in contact with the widow of the last Kyte to live in Silvermines. She provided me with the information that she knew but unfortunately it did not go back far enough either. While in Silvermines, I did speak with a long-time resident who was acquainted with the Kyte family there. He commented that the family may have come from The Netherlands. The Kyte name does appear in Scandinavia and The Netherlands, but the majority is found in United Kingdom. Kytes are also found in Modreeny and Dolla civil parishes in County Tipperary.
In 2012, I was contacted by a researcher with the recently formed Silvermines Historical Society. She was researching a Kyte family from Silvermines who had immigrated to Australia. She was not able to find any documentation connecting our family with that family.
Another belief on the origin of the Kyte family in Ireland comes from George William Kyte (1864-1940). He is quoted in the Canadian Who's Who book about 1912 that his grandfather came from Templemore also in County Tipperary. There are some historical facts that may support the Templemore roots. The Carden Baronetcy was centered at Templemore beginning in 1787. A biography is given of each of the seven Cardens who held Barnane in succession until the last died in 1932. Perhaps the most famous (or notorious) of these was John Rutter Carden (1811-1866), who evicted many of his tenants from the estate and was shot at on several occasions, earning the nickname "woodcock" because the bullets always missed him (though one of his stewards was murdered). The eviction time frame would correspond with the Kyte ancestors' departure from Ireland to Nova Scotia. On the other hand, there was a Kyte family living on Templemore Road in the Modreeny area. Unfortunately, I did not find George’s information until after our trip in 2006; so I wasn’t able to research his belief.
In 2016, new Irish records were placed online that document the marriage of Patrick Kyte and Helen Mahoney in Killenaule, Co. Tipperary, Ireland. In addition, the baptism of their son John is documented also in Killenaule. The dates are different than information in Cape Breton, but within reason. Patrick's father and grandfather are also documented in Killenaule. This seems to resolve the question of the Kyte family to the early 1700's. Killenaule is not far from Silvermines. There are Kytes documented in Silvermines in the 1800's. Possibly, Patrick Michael Kyte moved his family to Silvermines prior to emigrating to Nova Scotia.
A number of the Kyte family members were born with a hereditary hearing ailment that caused degeneration of the audio nerve. One particularly impacted family is John Anthony Kyte and his sons.
The following excerpt from "The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Irish Catholics" by Mark G. Mcgowan provides some general historic background for Irish Catholics in Nova Scotia in the early 19th century:
Although Irish migrants, merchants, and fisherman also appeared in Newfoundland in the seventeenth century, and in Nova Scotia in the 1740s, the principal Irish Catholic migration to what was to become British North America took place between 1815 and 1845 and was directly tied to changes in Ireland itself. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, agricultural prices fell and the Irish textile industry, which had enjoyed trading advantages in the disrupted wartime markets, faced stiff international competition. Industries shut down, unemployment rose dramatically, and capital investment and urban growth stagnated. Further, economic decline was exacerbated by developments in the Irish landholding system. Rural Ireland was characterized by a system of landholding dominated by Protestant owners of estates at the top and predominantly native Irish Catholic cottiers (tenant farmers with tiny patches of land for subsistence) and rural labourers at the bottom. In between were a group of middling and small tenant farmers, both Catholic and Protestant. Tenants unable to earn enough from their crops to pay their rents faced eviction, while landlords and small farmers looked to such alternatives as cattle and sheep to restore the economic viability of their lands.
These stresses of agricultural life were complicated even more by a dramatic population explosion; between 1821 and 1841 the Irish population increased from 6.8 to 8.2 million. Larger families meant either smaller plots for farmers’ children or no land at all. While this rapid population growth applied pressure on tenants to subdivide, the crash of farm prices made it necessary that landlords combine smaller plots into larger holdings to accommodate herding and livestock breeding, a lucrative alternative to cereals, root crops, and flax. A final ingredient for agricultural disaster was the unwillingness of landlords and their “head tenants” to reduce rents. Landlords still had to make their own contributions to the ever-increasing taxes needed to help the poor, and evicting tenants for non-payment of rents provided an opportunity to merge the smaller holdings into pasture lands. Thus, the combination after 1815 of falling prices, population pressures, the inability of tenants to pay rent, the movement to “enclose” lands for pasture, and increased evictions and subsequent landlessness convinced many Irish that there was little future for themselves and their children in rural Ireland. Migration appeared to be a possible solution to the economic decline, poverty, and growing violence.
Protestants and Catholics responded differently to the lure of migration. Protestants were better able than their Catholic neighbors to pay the expensive fares to North America. They also had added incentive to leave, including a fear of the rural violence often perpetrated against them by Catholic secret societies and a general feeling that their status as the religious minority made them exiles in their own land. Attracted by offers of land grants in British North America, some of the most enterprising young Protestants left Ireland. Irish Catholics, generally from among the middling and small tenant farmers, also increased their levels of emigration by the early 1820s, when fares between British North America and British ports dropped substantially. Destitute Catholics from the cottier and laborer groups, however, tended either to stay put in Ireland or to take advantage of the low fares to Great Britain.
Irish Catholic migration to Canada after 1815 is notable for its regional character and the complex relationship between the state of economic hopelessness left behind in Ireland and the “pulls” of forestry, fishing, and farming in the British North American colonies. Each colony was settled by Irish from different regions of Ireland and for different economic and social reasons.
Nova Scotia
The earliest Catholic migrants to Nova Scotia sojourned and settled in Cape Breton and in Halifax County. Many Irish Catholic immigrants to Cape Breton Island were actually “two boaters,” Irish Catholics who settled initially in Newfoundland but then left for Nova Scotia to improve their economic and social standing. Cape Breton was increasingly attractive to such people after 1815, when Newfoundland was mired in a post-war economic depression made even worse by reduced fish stocks. Cape Breton also attracted those interested in farming, mining, and the merchant trade in the port of Sydney. By the mid-nineteenth century Irish Catholic migrants, both “two boaters” and those directly from southeastern Ireland, had settled in the Sydney area, along the north shore of Cape Breton between Margaree and Port Hood, and in the southeast near St Peter’s and Arichat. By mid-century, however, the heavy migration of Acadians and Scottish Highland Catholics to eastern Nova Scotia ensured that the Irish Catholic population constituted a small minority on Cape Breton Island.
In sharp contrast to Cape Breton, the Irish Catholic population in Halifax was a numerically large minority from the middle of the eighteenth century. Founded in 1749 as a counterweight to France’s Louisbourg on Île-Royale (Cape Breton), Halifax attracted many Irish Catholics in search of employment, particularly on construction projects. Though they were not encouraged to come, because of their religion and ethnicity, by 1767 there may have been 467 Irish Catholics in the area, constituting perhaps as much as 16 percent of the population. Not surprisingly, given the commercial ties between Halifax and Waterford, many of these Irish Catholic migrants hailed from Kilkenny, Waterford, south Tipperary, and east Cork. Irish Catholics continued to constitute about one-sixth of Halifax’s population until the significant increase in migration after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. From 1815 to 1838 nearly 11,000 Irish, mostly Catholics, arrived in Halifax, creating an invigorated minority that, by 1837, constituted more than one-third (35 percent) of the town’s population. The mere trickle of Irish Catholic migrants after 1838 was only briefly interrupted by the arrival of 1,200 famine refugees in 1847. By 1851 the Catholic population of Halifax stood at 8,800, or 42 percent of the total population. Representing 85 percent of the Catholic population as a whole, Irish Catholics were clearly the dominant minority group in the colonial capital. Province-wide, the Irish made up approximately one-third of Nova Scotia’s population by 1838. The vast majority of these Nova Scotia Irish were Catholic, with the notable exception of settlers in the Cumberland County-Truro area and the Anglo-Irish elite in Halifax.
I'm not sure that there is any documentation in County Tipperary about the family prior to what you've found. I was told on our visit there that records were destroyed during The Troubles.
I have quite a bit of information about the family in North America. I might be able to help if you have other questions.
Susan
