Morgan,
You ask what was happening in Ireland in 1847 that might make someone leave. The most obvious answer is the famine, though there were other economic factors encouraging migration all through the 1800s. The famine just speeded the process up.
Ireland has very few natural resources (no oil, coal, iron ore etc) and so did not benefit from the industrial revolution in the 1800s, the way Scotland, England, the US, Canada & Australia did, which created hundreds of thousands of comparatively well-paid new jobs in new industries (coal mining, steel making, ship building etc). So that was a big pull factor. There had also been a huge population explosion in Ireland going up from about 3 million people in 1750 to 8 million in 1830. There simply weren?t the jobs for all those people. In much of Ireland the only employment was subsistence farming topped up in Ulster and one or two other areas with a bit of linen weaving. And then the straw that broke the camel?s back, along came the famine, numerous times throughout the 1800s. The worst period was when the potato crop failed almost completely 3 years in a row in the late 1840s, and then partially several more years after that. Many farmers were very much one crop dependent, because you could grow more potatoes to the acre than any other crop, but as a consequence they had nothing else to fall back on, and because it was largely a barter economy they mostly had no spare cash to buy food. When the crop failed 3 years in a row, people ended up eating their seed potatoes, leaving them nothing to plant the next spring. It is estimated that during the years 1845 to 1850, around 800,000 people died of starvation or of a famine-related disease such as typhus, dysentery, scurvy or pellagra. A further two million people emigrated. Unlike earlier famines, in which the population recovers quickly from the catastrophe and continues to grow, the after- effects of the Great Irish Famine were such that the population of Ireland, standing at 8.2 million people in 1841, declined to 6.6 million in 1851. Fifty years later, Ireland's population was still showing a decline (down to 4.5 million), even though every other European country was showing a population increase. Ireland?s population did not return to its pre-famine heights until 1964. Approximately 8 million people left Ireland between 1801 and 1900 - the equivalent of the entire pre-Famine population. The population today is only around 6 million.
Ramsay is a predominantly Scottish name and your ancestors probably came from Scotland in the 1600s, either as apart of the Plantation or because of the famine there in the late 1600s. During the course of the 1600s, some 100,000 Scots settled in Ireland representing 10% of the entire Scottish population. Though the vast majority were Presbyterian, not all were. Co Fermanagh (the next county to Tyrone) has very few Presbyterians. Most of there Scots setters there were from the Scottish borders and came with no religion, and ultimately joined the Church of Ireland (Episcopalian). Intermarriage sometimes also led to changes in denomination.
Can?t say why your ancestor would have put Gt Britain for his ethnicity. That?s evidently how he perceived himself. Tyrone was (and still is) all part of the UK at the time anyway, so his nationality was British. So it wasn?t inaccurate.
Elwyn
