Ron, Ireland has always been a largely agricultural county. Land was the biggest source of employment in the 1830s and it still is today. The country has almost no natural resources eg coal, iron ore, valuable minerals, oil etc and save for linen mills and ship building in Belfast, the industrial revolution largely passed it by. And that was one of the many factors that led to mass emigration from Ireland in the 1800s. There had been a population explosion (up from 3 million in 1741 to 8 million in 1841) and there were no jobs for most of those people. And that’s before we consider the impact of the famine, insecure tenure and lack of spare land. So whilst farming may be a lowly occupation elsewhere, it was up near the top of the chain in Ireland. Of course the size of the farm mattered too. There were a lot of subsistence level cottiers and small farmers, with a few acres, but there were some quite wealthy farmers too. If you go to the Ulster American Folk Park near Omagh you can see various categories of farm. The Campbell Household’s farm (originally near Plumbridge but now in the Park) was a very wealthy farm, and they had hundreds of acres:
https://www.nmni.com/our-museums/ulster-american-folk-park/Things-to-see/Campbell-House.aspx Then you had smaller ones like the Mellon farm (of the Mellon Bank family). They had 23 acres: https://www.nmni.com/our-museums/ulster-american-folk-park/Things-to-see/Mellon-Homestead.aspx And there were much poorer ones than that. But most farmers were much better off than the average labourer/weaver, especially in many of the Ulster Counties where a lot of the land was better than in many other parts of Ireland, and you could get a tolerable living from a surprisingly small piece of land. Farmers in Ireland were usually above labourers and servants in the social class. Indeed they usually employed them. If you look at the average farm on Griffiths Valuation, you’ll see that many had anywhere between 1 and sometimes as many as 10 labourers cottages scattered around the farm. The farm and farmhouse is usually shown as plot a, and the cottages are b, c, d etc, with the farmer as landlord. Those labourers normally rented from the immediate farmer (and not from his landlord) and either paid their rent in cash or by an agreed number of days work a year on the farm, or sometimes a mix of the two. Have a look at the 1831 census for Co. Londonderry and you’ll also see how many servants there were, and that gives you an idea of how many farms had servants. It’s difficult to quantify how wealthy farmers were in simple money terms because a lot was a barter economy. There were some things money was needed for eg a ticket to America but a major part ran on barter. So there may not have been much money in many a farmer’s bank but if he had a 3 lives lease and a few cows and 25 acres of barley, hay, flax and spuds he would have been pretty well off by the standards of the time. The labourer with 2 or 3 perches of land, whose only cash income was from a little winter home weaving, was right down the bottom of the social order. A hand to mouth existence at times. During the famine years it was the labourers who starved. Many farmers were quite well off. Indeed prices for barley and wheat rose during the famine years. Few farmers in Ulster suffered starvation then. Their potatoes were blighted but they had other resources to fall back on. The labourers only had a few perches and you can grow more spuds per acre than any other crop. Plus they are low maintenance. So they were ideal for a labourer with little land and a large family. Till the blight came of course and then they were crippled. It wasn't quite so bad in Ulster because many labourers had linen weaving money to fall back on. That's a reason why the impact of the famine was a little less in Ulster than in the rest of Ireland. (I don't have stats for Tyrone but according to Bill McAfee's website, in Ireland as a whole the population dropped by 20% between 1841 and 1851 but in Co. Antrim it only went down by 2%. I think for Ulster it was about a 5 or 7%% drop.I forget the exact number). If farming was well up the social order, you might wonder why farmers emigrated. I have touched on lack of security of tenure, and some were evicted (usually for non payment of rent), but a big driver was the normal practice of leaving the farm to the eldest son. Farms were sometimes subdivided, and some farmers managed to acquire two or more farms, which enabled them to leave a farm to more than one son, but in general the eldest son got the farm and the rest of the sons had to find their own way in the world. So they may have been farmers in Ireland but they didn’t have a farm of their own nor one to inherit and so migrated. And of course in both the US and Canada it was often possible to buy land outright or even acquire it for little cost with various land grant systems. So they were attractive pull factors for Irish farmers. I don’t know if this is what you wanted to know. Let me know if you have any other questions. Elwyn On 21/06/2019, Ron McCoy via CoTyroneList <cotyronelist@cotyroneireland.com> wrote: > HI Elwyn > > In your response you say ," Only wealthier folk such > > as farmers and merchants could afford a gravestone." In our modern world > Farmers are not considered wealthy people in North America they are down the > cast system pretty far. Some of my family records in Tyrone or upon coming > to Canada they list themselves as being Farmers as opposed to Labourers or > servants or renters etc..like most of the other settlers here. Does them > listing themselves as Farmers mean something more then we take from it > today? Does it mean money or position in the 1830"s? Can you elaborate on > that for me if it does what would that entail for them and their families? > Cheers > Ron McCoy > > On 2019-06-21 8:33 a.m., elwyn soutter via CoTyroneList wrote: >> Darlene, >> >> You can use the Griffiths Valuation site to see where the surname >> Adams was found in Co Tyrone in 1860. There are 144 listed, right >> across the county. There were 223 Adams in the county in the 1901 >> census. >> >> But the problem you really face is that hardly any parishes in Tyrone >> have any records for the mid 1700s and so even if you knew exactly >> where Thomas was born, there probably isn’t a documentary record of >> it. >> >> With regard to burials, it very much depends on what their trade was >> and again what denomination. Only the Church of Ireland routinely kept >> burial records, so if your ancestors were another denomination it’s >> unlikely that there will be any church records of their burials >> (assuming records exist in the first place). Only wealthier folk such >> as farmers and merchants could afford a gravestone, and the vast >> majority of people were buried without one. So it’s important to try >> and establish what their occupation was to assess the likelihood of >> there being a gravestone to find. >> >> >> > _______________________________________________ > CoTyroneList Mailing List > Mailing List Email Address: CoTyroneList@cotyroneireland.com > Change Your Preferences: > http://mail.cotyroneireland.com/mailman/listinfo/cotyronelist_cotyroneireland.com > Mailing List Archive: https://goo.gl/mQCKrY > _______________________________________________ CoTyroneList Mailing List Mailing List Email Address: CoTyroneList@cotyroneireland.com Change Your Preferences: http://mail.cotyroneireland.com/mailman/listinfo/cotyronelist_cotyroneireland.com Mailing List Archive: https://goo.gl/mQCKrY
