In Search of Sperrins Ancestors: A practical guide and sourcebook

By William Roulsten

This booklet is designed to be an introduction to the sources available for researching Sperrins ancestors and where they can be found. It is aimed at those starting out in their quest to find out more about their family history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ulster Historical Foundation
• Release date: Feb 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781908448446

Book preview

PRONI.

chapter

1

Introduction

Every year the island of Ireland receives thousands of overseas visitors. A very high proportion of those who come do so because their ancestors once lived here. Some are merely interested in the land of their forebears as a relaxing and enjoyable holiday destination. Many visitors, however, travel to Ireland with the express purpose of finding out more about their family history. Of these some will know very little about where their ancestors actually came from – perhaps a county or at best a parish. Others will arrive equipped with a large collection of information that will have allowed them to pinpoint the very townland where their ancestor once lived.

For many people who visit Ireland in search of their ancestors great importance is attached to finding the family homestead or burial place. This book will show you how to go about finding these places. It offers practical advice on the range of sources that are available for family history research, where to find these sources and how to use them. The vast majority of records for the Sperrins area are held by the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI).

The best way for someone to begin researching the history of their family is within their own family. In nearly every family there is at least one member with an encyclopaedic knowledge of who married who and how many children they had and where they lived etc., etc. Collect as much information as possible on names, dates and places relating to your family; write it down and begin to plot out the skeleton of a family tree. A family Bible is another possible source of information on your ancestors. Gathering this information before you visit the archives can save a great deal of time.

The Sperrins in history

People have been living in the Sperrins for at least 5,500 years. The Sperrins is one of the richest areas in Ireland for prehistoric archaeological remains. The area is particularly noted for its stone circles, the most important group of which is at Beaghmore. There are many other megalithic monuments, a large number of which represent burial sites. The most important include the court tomb at Creggandevesky and the wedge tomb at Loughmacrory. These monuments were constructed by early farmers, but as the bog began to advance so the land became unproductive and the farmers moved away to more fertile areas. The uplands of the Sperrins became virtually uninhabited and what settlement there was in the area was almost exclusively confined to the river valleys such as the Glenelly, Owenkillew, Owenreagh, Ballinderry and Moyola. Here in the first millennium AD the more substantial farmers lived in circular raths or ringforts, some of which still survive.

It will probably never be known when Christianity was brought to the Sperrins, but its influence over the last 1,500 or so years is to be seen in every locality. St Patrick is associated with a number of sites in the Sperrins, including Bodoney. Parishes began to be formed from the twelfth century, each of which had its own parish church. Some ecclesiastical sites were of some importance. For instance there were once cathedrals at Ardstraw and Maghera. A number of these early sites are still in use; others will have been abandoned (see section of Graveyards for more information). A few monasteries were also founded, including Dungiven priory and Corick abbey.

By the late middle ages the dominant people group in the area – and far beyond it – were the Ui Neill, the chief clan of which was the O’Neills. Other clans were subordinate to the O’Neills, including the O’Cahans, O’Hagans and O’Donnellys. Gaelic power in Ulster collapsed at the beginning of the seventeenth century following the surrender of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, to the Crown in 1603 at the end of the Nine Years War. In 1607 he, along with the Earl of Tyrconnell and nearly 100 others, departed from Ireland in which became known as the ‘Flight of the Earls’. Following this the Crown embarked on a policy of plantation. Land confiscated