Ireland Project WikiTree

Hello Adam,

Welcome to Wikitree! I am not the project manager, but will do my best to help. Tracing emigrants back to Ireland is hard work when possible and often not possible at all. There are so many people and places with the same names, and so many different spellings for each name that it is very hard to work out which is which and very easy to jump to wrong conclusions. As a general rule, you should try to find every scrap of information that you can about an emigrant from outside Ireland before trying to find them in Ireland. Names, dates, places, occupation, religions, wealth/social status and so on.

The profile that you mention (Blair-15209) is said there and on FamilySearch to have been from county Antrim, but I believe you are right that the townland is really in the Derry/Londonderry part of the parish of Ballymoney. The only source cited on Wikitree is FamilySearch and the only two sources cited there are a baptism record for one of his children in Massachusetts which is unlikely to be helpful and a 'legacy source' which itself links back to this book The Blair Family of New England. There is some information on the family there, eg starting from page 19. This gives something on the parents of your James Blair, but I certainly couldn't vouch for its accuracy. (Even the author uses phrases like 'as far as I can make out', without as far as I can see citing any factual sources to support her arguments.) I would be wary of this. At first glance, I am far from sure that the people she mentions in New England were from the same family as the ones she mentions in Ireland. If one is to believe what she wrote, then it seems likely that the Blairs were Protestants, and that the family of Rankin, said to have been that of James' mother were Scots, so possibly Presbyterians. The section in the book on your James starts on p 43 where the author tells us that his wife's name (present on Wikitree and FamilySearch) is not known. She mentions children, Isabel, Mary, John and Hugh, but not Samuel, from whom all the descendants seem to come. The only source for Samuel on Wikitree is FamilySearch. There are lots of sources there, but without spending time to check, I can't see whether any of them firmly places him in the family of his parents and grandparents.

In short, I think there is a lot to do to firmly establish what you already have. If you do rely on information from the book, then I would cite it directly as a source rather than doing so indirectly via FamilySearch.

Irish sources will prove difficult. If your Blairs were members of the Church of Ireland, you may want to look for parish records. The definitive listing of what is available is here. It shows that available records for Ballymoney start in 1807. They are available locally and probably also in PRONI (Public Records Office of Northern Ireland) where they are not on line. This page from PRONI tells you that they have Presbyterian records for Ballymoney, but they too are not available on line although they have been digitised.

There is large number of sources for this period grouped together under Early modern Irish sources, some of which may be helpful to you. The page 'Irish Quaker Sources and Resources' has information on PRONI, the National Archives of Ireland (whose genealogy page) might be useful and other general sources, one of the most useful of which might be the register of deeds. The page Rebellion, Plantation and War has information on records from the Ulster Plantation (including settlers from Scotland), the Rebellion of 1641, the Cromwellian settlement, the census of 1659 and so on. You might check the hearth tax records from there, many of which for Londonderry are available. The page local histories, has some histories relevant to the Presbyterian Church and the page FamilySearch Free text search has information on access to FamilySearch's new tool to access its records, the most important of which is probably the registry of deeds. I would certainly try this.

However, whatever you find, you will still be left with the problem of demonstrating that any Blairs you find in Ulster were the same family that emigrated to New England. I fear that that will be very difficult.

Good luck!

I knew record keeping back then was almost non existent making things difficult. That's why I wanted a pros help.

Thank you Adam Tarbaux

The problem is not just poor record keeping. Most of the records were concentrated in the Public Records Office in Dublin (what would now be called the National Archives) where they were blown up in the Civil War in 1922. Irish historians and genealogists have to scrape through with copies, abstracts and records which happen not to have been sent there.

I forgot about the civil war and the troubles effected the records. Just like the 1973 fire in our national archives.