Martha Sloan

Stuart,

Martha’s birth is long before the start of statutory birth registration in Ireland (1864) so to trace her you need church records. You haven’t said what denomination she was but in this case it probably doesn’t matter as no denomination in Loughguile has any records for 1820. (I see that Martha’s marriage in Scotland was Church of Scotland. That suggests she was Presbyterian. Sadly Loughguile Presbyterian has no records before 1862).

I did look in the 1803 agricultural census for the parish.

http://billmacafee.com

There was just 1 Sloan household. A widow Sloan lived in Kingarriff at that date. (Today that’s near the intersection of the Gracehill Rd & Kingarriff Rd and not too far from Armoy). There were no Sloan households in that townland by the time of Griffiths Valuation in 1861.

Griffiths has 3 Sloan households in Loughguile, all headed by a John. One was in Ballyveely Upper, another in Castlequarter and the last in Lavin Lower.

http://www.askaboutireland.ie/griffith-valuation/index.xml?action=nameS…

All the families had left those townlands by the time of the 1901 census, and I don’t see any families in the general area at all.

I can see from Scottish records that William Coleman was a labourer in Scotland so it’s likely that was his profession in Ireland too. In contrast with farmers who usually stayed in the same place for long periods of time, labourers often moved around a lot to follow the available work. Tracing them can be very difficult because of this mobility combined with the general lack of Irish records for that period.

The likelihood of someone today knowing about a labouring family who left Loughguile over 170 years ago is not very great, in my opinion.

Much of the population of that part of Antrim originated in Scotland in the 1600s (earlier in some cases). Most Presbyterians in Ireland are of Scottish origins. So it’s quite possible that your Sloan family had only lived in Ireland for a couple of hundred years, before returning to Scotland for economic reasons in the 1840s or thereabouts.

Thanks, Elwyn, I appreciate you taking the time to reply. I like the idea of the Sloans from Scotland coming to Ireland for a few hundred years then returning! It's a shame so many records were lost or not made in the first place. Cheers, Stuart