Three possible Hurst brothers from County Tyrone Ireland who immigrated to Canada. William b 1785, James b pre 1809 and Samuel b 1796

Regarding the 1851 marriage, it  took place in 1st Omagh Meeting House. So that was 1st Omagh Presbyterian church. Presbyterians in Ireland often call their churches Meeting Houses. Tradition was to marry in the bride’s church, so not necessarily the same church where children will later be baptised.

Wesleyan Methodists in Ireland, pre 1816 would have been Church of Ireland.  (Methodism didn’t get going as a  separate denomination in Ireland till after that due to a reluctance to split with the Church of Ireland).  Church of England in Canada would be Church of Ireland in Ireland.

Birth & death registration didn’t start in Ireland till 1864, and 1845 for non RC marriages. Prior to that we rely heavily on church records, where they survive. Not many parishes have records for the 1700s. You can see what exists, parish by parish, using the PRONI guide to church records. See this link:

https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/publications/guide-church-records

The records there are not on-line and a personal visit is required to view them.

Researching in Ireland in the 1700s is very hard going due to the general lack of records. If you don’t know where they lived it’s a needle in a haystack. Ideally you need to know the person’s exact denomination and the townland or parish they lived in to have any chance of finding them, and even then there may not be any records for that location.

Possibly DNA testing may be a way of matching with others who have additional information about where the family originate. Family Tree DNA reportedly has more people with Ulster roots than any other company. That obviously increases the chances of finding a match. You might want to try them or, if you have already tested, you can transfer your results to them for no fee.

The North of Ireland Family History Society is running an Ulster DNA project in conjunction with FTDNA and can offer testing kits at a reduced price.  http://www.nifhs.org (Go to DNA project on the website).

Only Kid,

According to MacLysaght’s “The Surnames of Ireland”, Hurst is “A common name in England. Hurst is often of different origin in Ireland, viz, a corrupt anglicised form of de Horsaigh, recte Horsey from the Norfolk place-name.” MacLysaght makes no mention of Palatine Refugees as a likely origin. He seems to plump simply for them being English.

So you are left to decide for yourself where your Hurst ancestors came from. Yours seemed to be Church of Ireland. That generally suggests Scottish or English origins. Perhaps from Norfolk?

They are undoubtedly incomers at some point in the past. If they were Protestant then that generally indicates they came to Ireland in the Plantation 1610 - 1625 or later. From England, Scotland or Wales.  There are no Hursts listed anywhere in Ulster, let alone Tyrone in the 1630 Muster Rolls. So that suggests an arrival after 1630.

I have never heard of any significant settlement of Palatine Refugees in Tyrone or Ulster generally and think that a fairly unlikely origin. The relatively few Palatine families who remained in Ireland seem mostly to have been living in Counties Wexford or Limerick only.

Onlykid,

I can confirm that Rev Arnold was Minister of Omagh 1st. However the information on the website about their records does not appear to be quite right.  PRONI has a copy of baptisms starting in 1856 and marriages start in 1845. The marriages are on-line on the irishgenealogy site. Baptisms are in PRONI on microfilm MIC1P/128. Personal visit required to view them (or you could get a researcher in Belfast to do that for you).

There are no Bishop’s transcripts for Presbyterians. That’s a Church of England practice. The Presbyterian church in Ireland (and in the UK) doesn’t have any Bishops. Consequently no Bishop’s transcripts.

Bear in mind that tradition was to marry in the bride’s church, after which she’d normally attend her husband’s. So the Nixon family was probably Presbyterian (and so likely of Scottish origins. Hence your Scottish DNA perhaps). You say the Hursts were Methodist in Canada. Well that points to them being Church of Ireland in Ireland up until the 1830s anyway. The 1851 marriage tells you both families lived in the parish of Cappagh. There are two Methodist meeting houses in that parish in Aghagallon and Maine/Mayne. Both have baptisms from 1831 but no marriages. That tells you they were still marrying in the Church of Ireland. Prior to 1831 both baptisms and marriages would have been in the Church of Ireland. Cappagh Church of Ireland has baptism, marriage and burial records starting in 1753. Again copies are held in PRONI (as are the Methodist baptism records).

The 1901 Irish census had 432 Hursts throughout Ireland of whom 33 were in Co. Tyrone. Of those in Tyrone, about half were Catholic and the remainder a mix of Church of Ireland and Presbyterian. No Methodists at all.

I would agree it was not a very common name in Tyrone (in 1901 anyway).

Additional registration districts which have records for Tyrone are: Strabane, Gortin, Castlederg, Enniskillen & Lowtherstown/Irvinestown.

When searching the irishgenealogy site, bear in mind that for Co Tyrone (which is in Northern Ireland) they only have records up to 31.12.1921. Records after that are only on the GRONI website which is pay to view.

The Methodist records in PRONI that you are interested in are only viewable if you go in person (or get a researcher to go for you). Bear in mind my previous advice that Methodism in Ireland took a long time to become a separate denomination, and its members continued to use the Church of Ireland for baptisms and marriages well into the 1800s. In Dungannon the Methodist baptisms start in 1830 and marriages in1865. Prior to those years they would have used the Church of Ireland.

Only Kid,

The 1881 probate abstract that you have found for Samuel Hurst indicates that he died intestate (ie left no will). Where there was a will it usually says: “Probate of the will of….”. Where someone dies intestate then it says: “Administration of the estate of…”. There are some minor variations but that’s the basic rule.

So, as far Ireland is concerned, Samuel’s estate here was disposed of under the laws of intestacy. I assume that must be the same in Canada.

It looks to me as though Samuel died intestate in March 1869 in Canada. His estate there will hopefully have been wound up reasonably soon after his death. However some years later it emerged that he had assets in Ireland (evidently less than £50) which were not included previously, presumably because no-one knew he had them. Consequently when they were discovered, his widow, as executrix, applied to the Dublin probate court for administration in order to access them. Typically the assets here might have been an insurance policy or money in a bank account, but who knows? The detail would usually be in the probate file.

Probate was granted at the Principal Registry (ie Dublin). There were numerous other Registries around Ireland eg Belfast, Londonderry and Cork, but his executors chose Dublin. That probate file was destroyed in the 1922 fire in the Public Record Office in Dublin during the civil war and all that survives today is the abstract (summary) which was kept elsewhere and so has survived. We don’t know precisely what was in the lost file.

You ask whether the Hursts would have stayed put in Ireland. The answer like so many things in life is that it all depends. Farmers stayed put for generations. (You don’t normally spend 20 years improving a farm only to give up and move somewhere else and start again). In contrast, labourers and others often moved around to follow the available work. William Hurst who married in Omagh in 1851 was a servant and his father was a labourer. Servants and labourers did move around.  It would have been unusual for them to have travelled the length of Ireland but to move 15 or 20 miles would not. And then of course many went to Scotland for work too, sometimes seasonal (for the harvests) and sometimes permanently. Many Lowland Scots farmers got rid of their permanent labourers in the early 1800s (many of whom were happy to go due to the industrial revolution which created better paid jobs) and so Scottish farmers then needed seasonal labourers from Ireland to help with planting and harvesting. So you got that sort of movement too.

Regarding Enniskillen and Lowtherstown/Irvinestown registration districts, both are in Co Fermanagh but included chunks of Tyrone. So many of the events in their records will be for Fermanagh but some are for Tyrone.

Lowtherstown was renamed Irvinestown sometime around 1870.

Gortin registration district was closed down around 1875 because it was too small and distributed to the surrounding districts eg Strabane and Omagh. Can be confusing.

Possibly DNA testing may be a way of matching with others who have additional information about where the family originate. Family Tree DNA reportedly has more people with Ulster roots than any other company. That obviously increases the chances of finding a match. You might want to try them or, if you have already tested, you can transfer your results to them for no fee.

The North of Ireland Family History Society is running an Ulster DNA project in conjunction with FTDNA and can offer testing kits at a reduced price.  http://www.nifhs.org (Go to DNA project on the website).

Re Sheerigrim, I don’t know precisely where it is in Cappagh. Tyrone Constitution of 27th Nov 1846 reports the sale of “Sheergrim and that portion of the Forest next the town of Omagh was purchased by Mr Todd for £6,700.” The preamble says it was part of Mountjoy Forest. So it was apparently part of either Mountjoy Forest East or West (both are townlands). It might show on the OS maps on the GRONI site (try those for the 1800s).

With the delay between death and probate, you see that quite a bit in Ireland. Executors miss things, and don’t always wind up estates properly. In those cases you see a re-grant of probate. In your case it looks like an initial grant (in Ireland) so I’d guess that’s when the assets first came to notice.

In my own family’s case, I was my mother’s executor. About 5 years after her estate had been wound up her former bank wrote to say they had been clearing out a safe and had found a file with some share certificates that she had deposited. She had forgotten about them and so evidently had they. In the event the certificates were obsolete but you can see why some estates have further probate action long after the person’s decease.