Parish Name

Irene:

The spelling of the townland is Beltoy. Carneal is correct. Raloo is a small parish and I assume a farming area but someone local will need to confirm.

Roger McDonnell

The marriage between John Tayior & Jane Thompson was registered in Larne 1852 Volume 6, page 516. You can order a photocopy of the cert from GRO Roscommon for ?4. Put the year, place, volume & page number on the order form (anywhere).

http://www.groireland.ie/

Griffiths Valuation for 1861 has a William Thompson listed for Carneal. He shared part of a house with Alexander Finlay on plot 34 a & b.  Perhaps that was Jane?s family. That house was at the intersection of the modern Carneal and Ballyvallagh Roads. No Taylor household listed in Beltoy in 1861. Either the family had moved or they were not listed for some other reason. There were Taylors in Carneal, so perhaps they moved there. This looks like your family. They arrived there in 1875 according to the revaluation records. They had a farmhouse, outbuildings and just over 11 acres, on plot 23 which is just to the north of the Thompson property. The Taylors left in 1905.

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/pages/1901/Antrim/Raboo/Carneal/9…

Beltoy and Carneal are beside each other. Both were (and still are) agricultural rural areas between Larne and Carrickfergus.

Non RC marriage registration started in April 1845 but birth registration did not start till 1864. So you won?t get a birth cert for William. You might get his baptism but to do that you would need to know which church he attended.

The families appear to have been Presbyterian so that would indicate their ancestors were from Scotland. The majority arrived in the 1600s, when some sources say 100,000 Scots settled in Ireland, representing 10% of the entire population of Scotland at the time.