I have heard a couple of talks given on Bob Hunter’s book. One or two general points that I recall were that the men listed there would normally all be adults and of fighting age, so perhaps between 17 and 50. The weapons they had tended to indicate their relative wealth. So in your case, the John Latham with a sword and caliver was quite well off, whereas the other with no arms was poor. Most people could usually borrow at least a pike, so if you had no arms at all you were probably a labourer.
Tracing forward from 1630 is virtually impossible unless you have a very wealthy or notorious family who might show up in the few sources that exist. But the average family at that time were able to live their entire life beneath officialdom’s radar.
A lot of Plantation settlers fled Co. Londonderry as a result of the 1641 uprising. Some returned later, some did not. So being there in 1630 doesn’t guarantee they were still there 15 years later. The 1659 census compiled by Sir Wm Petty is more commonly known as Pender’s Census. It analyses the population by townland. It only names the wealthy land owner families (the tituladoes) as California dreamin has explained. For the rest of the population, it’s just numbers of “Scotch”, “English” & “Irish.”
There were Undertakers who were granted land in Ireland around 1610 - 1625 because they “undertook” to plant it with settlers from their Scottish & English estates as well as constructing key buildings, and in those cases if you look to see where they came from, you can infer that some of their early tenants probably came from the same place. However Sir Thomas Philips was in a different class. He was a servitor, so he was granted land in return for having fought for the crown. It’s not clear (to me) how servitors got their tenants. Presumably if they had estates in Britain the same process could have applied. But I am not certain about that.
