see Figure 1. But the paucity of Ulster documents has
forced a broadening of scope. The purpose of this article is to
describe the living conditions of the Dunlap-Pattison family that
sent them to America.A Leap of Faith:
The Dunlap–Pattison Family of Maghera,
Northern Ireland (1740-1820)
by Dr. William M. Litchman, Ph.D., C.G.S.M.
If only all of our ancestors were kings and queens! Ordinary families always provide challenges. Families of Irish origin provide extra special challenges and Northern Irish families can try the patience of even the most dedicated family historians. Perhaps the most difficult part of coming to terms with family research in Ireland is finding the specific village or townland from which the family emigrated to North America.
Slaghtybogy, the townland of origin of the Dunlap-Pattison family near Maghera, County Derry, is given in an
eighteenth century hand-made family book. It also details the
structure of the family and their emigration from Ulster to
America,
see Figure 1. But the paucity of Ulster documents has
forced a broadening of scope. The purpose of this article is to
describe the living conditions of the Dunlap-Pattison family that
sent them to America.
Schematic of the Family of Joseph and Margaret Pattison
of Slaghtybogy, Parish of Maghera, County Derry (1716-1820)
Joseph Pattison (b ca 1716) m Margaret (—) before 1740 X[1741]
Children:
1. Mariann (b ca 1743, d ca 1790) X(b ca 1741, d ca 1790)
m William Dunlap (b ca 1740, d ca 1805-10) X (b ca 1738...
Children:
1. Joseph (b ca 1765, d Jul 1802)
m Elizabeth Arbuthnot (ca 1789)
X remove Elizabeth m(2) John Divine (1 Feb 1805)
Children:
1. William (b Mar 1790)
2. Robert (b Sep 1792)
3. Jane/Jean (b Mar 1795)
4. Mary Ann (b Jun 1797)
5. Nancy (b Jun 1800)
6. Joseph (b Dec 1802)
2. William (b Apr 1770, d 1833)
m Elizabeth Middleton (14 Feb 1799, d Sep 1819)
1. Andrew (b Feb 1801)
2. Mariann (b Apr 1802)
3. Margaret (b Oct 1803)
4. William Middleton (b Feb 1805)
5. John (b Jun 1806, d Nov 1815)
6. Sarah (b Feb 1809)
7. Elizabeth (b Nov 1810)
8. Susannah (b Mar 1812)
9. Amelia (b Nov 1813)
10. Joseph Pattison (b Jan 1814)
11. John M. (b Feb 1818)
12. Harriet (b Aug 1819)
3. Sarah (b ca 1775-80, d ca 1840-50)
m James Carey (1798, d ca 1827)
X remove 1. William (b ca 1800-09)
4. Child (b and d ca 1790)
2. William (b ca 1747, d aft 1821)
X remove m Sarah Ford (1780)
X remove Children:
X remove 1. Joseph (m Mary (–)
3. Matthew (b ca 1749, d bef 1823)
X remove m Mary (–) (ca 1781)
X remove Children:
X remove 1. Joseph (b ca 1781, m Charity Voorhees)
X remove 2. William
X remove 3. Martin (the “wandering son”)
X remove 4. Elizabeth (b bef 1801, m Peter Welch bef 1823)
Figure 1.
X insert “All data in this figure is from reference 1.”
Setting the economic stage for our story, a “Plantation”
scheme was instituted by the English King James I in about 1609,
in which the lands of Ireland, especially in Ulster, were offered to
the London crafts guilds at a nominal rent. Recurring rebellions of
the Irish were costing the English crown investment money as
well as lost income. The plan behind this was that the guilds
would find agents to recruit patriotic Scotsmen and northern
Englishmen to bring their families to settle in Ireland. By this
means the rebellious Irish population would be diluted and
subdued, the guilds would also glean a profit by the rents
gathered by their agents and the emigrants would find a better
economic life.
Each layer of renters would subdivide their holding, rent
smaller and smaller parcels of land for higher and higher rents
until at the lowest level one would find the actual user of the land,
the farmer, the tiller of the soil. The further up the ladder one
went, the more removed from the land the landlord became (in
general).
By the early eighteenth century, with the plantation
program well underway, Ireland was an open country for the
immigration of Scots, including, most likely, the ancestors of this
Dunlap-Pattison family. There was pressure at home from
increasing rents and the lack of market for home-made goods.
It
must have been very inviting for families to come to Ireland,
acquire land (through paying rents, of course) and then to
improve themselves financially. Certainly, the rebellions of the
native Irish were not part of the publicity!
Two benchmark dates for the family provide the time
period for records to seek in fleshing out this family’s Ulster
experience: 13 Mar 1790, the birth date for William Dunlap, eldest
known child
of Joseph Dunlap and Elizabeth Arbuthnot,
will [X
remove will] allows us to extrapolate the first, an approximate
beginning date, and the second is the voyage of the Ship Tristram
taking the family to America and providing closure.
The average age for men (25) and women (22) at
marriage,
and the assumption that all marriages occurred during
the year preceding the birth of the first child give us the
framework for our extrapolation. Using these assumptions,
Joseph and Elizabeth were probably married in 1789, Joseph was
probably born in 1764, William, sr, and Mariann were probably
married in 1763, and William, sr, was probably born no later than
1738 and Mariann Pattison about three years later.
Many Maghera-area Scots families came from County Ayr
and there are certainly Dunlap and Pattison families present in
that county throughout the 1700s.
No appropriate christenings are found for Joseph (ca
1764), William (Apr 1770), or Sarah Dunlap (1775-1780), nor are
there baptisms for Mariann Pattison (ca 1741), William Pattison
(ca 1746), or Matthew Pattison (ca 1748).
William Dunlap is such
a common name that it is impossible to know if our William is in
the records. No marriage for Joseph and Margaret Pattison is
found.
The townland of Slaghtybogy was the exclusive property
of the Vintner’s company and the first known renter was John
Elliott.
Any further sub-renting of the land would have had to be
through him or his successors and heirs. The Elliott family
continued to control the townland for quite a number of years.
Thomas Connolly, speaker of the Irish House of Commons,
purchased the lease in the mid 1700s and his heirs continued there
for many years thereafter.
Josh (Joseph?) Paddyson is listed as a resident of the
Parish of Maghera in 1740, Joseph Patterson in 1796,
and the
name of Joseph Pattison [not Patterson] is found as a resident of
Magherafelt,
a small community about 10 miles from Maghera,
and a part of the Salter’s plantation in 1766.
Harlan Page Dunlap about 1905 stated that William
Dunlap, sr, married “in Ireland, Mary Ann, daughter of Joseph
and Margaret Patterson [sic].”
One Dunlap infant and the
mother died and were buried in the “churchyard at Maghera”
prior to the departure of the family in 1792.
There were two churches at Maghera, both with burial
grounds, one the ancient (ca 1200) church of St. Lurach (originally
Catholic but by the late 1700s, Church of Ireland) and the other,
the recently finished (1785) Presbyterian church. No relevant
entries have been found in a search of the records of the Maghera
Presbyterian Church.
There are no early records extant from the
Church of Ireland in Maghera, nor were there any Dunlap names
found on extant stones found [X remove “found”] in the old St.
Lurach graveyard
even though the Dunlap name was once
known on those stones.
Since very few (7.7%) of the residents of Slaghtybogy were
Church of Ireland and nearly half (46%) were Presbyterian in
1831,
it seems most probable that the burial of Mariann Dunlap
and her child took place in the Presbyterian churchyard. It also
seems reasonable that the marriage of William Dunlap and
Mariann Pattison took place in Slaghtybogy, at the bride’s home,
and the marriage of William’s son, Joseph Dunlap, and Elizabeth
Arbuthnot a generation later, possibly at the church.
Long leases “are the ruin of Ireland.” These lengthy leases,
sometimes for 999 years, were very successful early in the
eighteenth century but they led to fixed rents at a time of rising
values and prices. Tenants were then able to sublet very
profitably. When primary leases finally ended, however,
landlords were able to deal directly with the sub-tenants,
especially in the “linen triangle” which included the Parish of
Maghera. From 1753 to 1791, the number of houses paying hearth
tax in Ulster almost doubled, giving northern landlords a unique
opportunity to “set” or lease estates to increase their income.
Especially toward the end of the eighteenth century, unrest, particularly first in Armagh and then spreading to other parts of Ulster, was growing more and more violent. Strife was mainly between individuals of the Protestant and Catholic faiths with atrocities committed on both sides.
Mariann Pattison had two brothers, William and Matthew,
who emigrated to America some years prior to the Dunlap
family,
probably in the wave of emigrations during the early
1770s.
Economic crisis struck Ireland about 1770 and emigration
rose to 10,000 per year at that time. Emigration abruptly ceased
with the American Revolution but the economic crisis
continued.
To quote another writer,
“the loss of people from the
northern part of Britain – from northern England, Scotland, and
Northern Ireland – sent shock waves throughout the kingdom.
People had been leaving these areas, particularly Ireland, since
the end of the seventeenth century, but after 1763 the pattern and
intensity of the migration changed. ... Sometimes whole
neighborhoods of families and friends would leave in associations
large enough to found their own wilderness communities. ...
These sudden changes led to a crisis in the early 1770s that was
described variously as a ‘madness,’ a ‘contagion,’ a ‘frenzy,’ and
an ‘evil’ that would have ‘ruinous’ and ‘dreadful’ consequences.”
Robert Johnston and several of his family members
emigrated from Barley Hill, a farm in Slaghtybogy, to
Pennsylvania in 1765.
They wrote letters back home extolling the
virtues of their new country and describing their new life in
detail.
William Dunlap (sr) was more likely to have been a
merchant or tradesman in Maghera or a nearby community rather
than a farmer like his father-in-law, Joseph Pattison. William (jr)
was trained in surveying even though he desired to learn
navigation for a career at sea.
His parents objected to the
dangers of a nautical profession and he certainly became
successful as a merchant and farmer in the new world. To be
schooled in surveying, William (jr) would need to be apprenticed
to a local surveyor or to attend a school to learn mathematics,
geometry, and trigonometry. An apprenticeship is more likely
since the state of schools in Northern Ireland at that time was
deplorable.
A coincidental incident [X “event”] which might possibly
have some relevance to the [Xurge of the] Dunlaps [XDunlaps’
urge] to migrate involves the change in leadership at the local
Presbyterian church. The Rev. David Smylie of Finvoy came to
Maghera in 1739 and served faithfully for many years until ill-health forced him to retire in 1778. He died 23 July 1780. At that
time the position was filled by Mr. John Glendy, ordained on 26
Dec 1778 as Mr. Smylie’s assistant and successor.
He had “warm
sympathies with the [Irish] revolutionary movement of the
period” and had to go into hiding when that effort failed in 1798.
It seems that “he was, in fact, a well-known if not an avowed
rebel.”
If the Dunlap and Pattison families weren’t very
sympathetic with the “revolutionary movement” and its methods,
they may have been very uncomfortable in the community once
Mr. Glendy was minister. With the increasing unrest of the people
of Ireland, particularly in Ulster, the Dunlap family felt (probably
with others) the need to emigrate to more propitious
surroundings.
All these stresses (economic, social, and political) were wreaking havoc with personal lives. Thus, the advantages which drew the Dunlaps and Pattisons to Northern Ireland originally, deteriorated until the decision to emigrate to North America must have seemed a relief. It was made easier, of course, because William and Matthew Pattison were already established in New Jersey. It was to them that the little Dunlap family went upon landing at Philadelphia.
We can venture to guess that William Dunlap, sr, would
have been about 52 years old at the time of his emigration from
Ireland to America. It took a deal of bravery and courage to
uproot his family from their home
in Ireland to make such a
lengthy and dangerous journey.
It is apparent from the tone of the writings of William
Dunlap
that the family were not indentured servants or
redemptioners, as many were. Thus, they were able to pay their
full passage, provide victuals for the passage, and have enough
resources to sustain themselves through the first year(s) of living
in the new world. The cost of passage averaged between 3 and 3.5
guineas
per adult passenger.
Only William (Joseph’s eldest, age
2) was a child so his passage was probably somewhat less. Sarah
would have been 17, William, jr, 22. Thus, there would have been
5 adults and 1 child on this trip for a total passage amount of
about 20 guineas or 21 pounds.
They sailed on the Ship Tristram.
“For Newcastle & Philadelphia
The fast sailing Ship
TRISTRAM
Burthen 300 tons
G. A. Hallowell, Master
Will be clear to sail for these Ports the 1st of April.
The Tristram is particularly well adapted for the Passenger
Trade. Those who wish to embrace this favourable Opportunity of
going in a strong, new Ship, will do well to make speedy
Application, as but 150 Passengers will be received. For Freight or
Passages apply to Mr Rob. Cochran, Strabane; Mr. King Barton,
Nn
Stewart; Mr. James King, Fintona; Mr. James Hamill,
Coleraine; Mr. David Blair, Nn-Lemavady; or John Atchison
Smyth and Co. Who engage that Plenty of Provisions and Water
shall be laid in for the Voyage.
N.B. The above vessell will sail the 8th of May, at which
Time the Passengers are requested to be on Board.”
“Schooner York, Stephenson, Liverpool
Capt. Stephenson, on the 5th July, spoke the Tristram, from
Derry for Philadelphia, with passengers, lat. 29, 20, long. 68“
Latitude 29 degrees, 20 minuntes is on a parallel with St. Augustine, Florida, and longitude 68 degrees, places the ship south and east but still fairly close to Bermuda, when they were only five days out from New Castle. Ships generally followed the trade winds in crossing the Atlantic by moving clockwise around a circle going east across the north and west across the mid-Atlantic. This is exactly the pattern suggested by that single “speaking” of the Tristram by the Schooner York.
“The Ship Tristram, Capt. Hallowell, is arrived at New
Castle from Londonderry, after a passage of 45 days with 150
passengers.”
“A very considerable number of Irish emigrants have
arrived in this and other states during the present month. Report
says that the spirit of emigration is so prevalent in Ireland;
especially in the northern and eastern [regions] that the lower and
middling classes would universally remove to this side of the
Atlantic, could they find ships to bring them off.”
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