Tithe Parish records

[wyanga]

Elwyn Soutter
    I don't think that this will help me. I have got to the land indexs page 2 and have Antrim 1739-1810.
 This is too late for what I am seeking.
 My direct line of Taylors were at Aird from at least 1734. I have George Taylor and Warren Taylor listed in the Religious Census for Cary Barony as householders and registered as Church ( C of I ). They could have been there for some years. George Taylor dies in 1738.
   What I am trying to do is to link the George Taylor in Aird  to the George Taylor that is recorded in the Hearth Money Rolls in 1669 at Tickmacrevan, Ballyvaddy or Mogle. The Taylors at Aird were tenant farmers with John McCollum the landlord.
   I really need records for the 1670 to 1700 period to be able to do that.
 Mind you records from 1739 might show if there were any Taylors left in Tickmacrevan.
   Yes you are correct about trying to trace labourers , I am aware of that . here in Aus we have very extensive immigration records, birth records and Marriage records as well as war service records so it is possible to build a fairly complete record of a family. Most of these are available on Ancestry.com for searching. But then we only go back to 1788 and most of our earliest settlers were convicts , of which i have about half a dozen. One, a Michael Rock was sent from England in 1798 but the English paper of the time says that he was a native of Co Down.
Wyanga
   

[Elwyn Soutter]

If the Taylor in Aird was a farmer then there may be records in the Registry of Deeds. Bear in mind that there were often numerous transactions. Sub-letting bits of land, renewals, and so on. So several deeds for the same family may be in the records over a span of years.

Ancestors who were labourers or weavers are unlikely to be in any deeds though. And indeed probably not in any records at all in the 1600s and early 1700s. Their lives would mostly be lived below officialdom’s radar.

[wyanga]

Elwyn Soutter
   I wont be winning any prizes for searching in the Deeds. I am not sure that I was in the right place.
In the first listing for Antrim I found was a series of images from films, by going through these the only entry for Aird was the one for McCollum  from the Earl of Antrim for Aird with a number of the entry. This would no doubt be in 1738 when John McCollum acquired the fee simple for Aird.
  There were several for places in Glenarm but none for Tickmacrevan.
 These Deeds were obviously for the land title to extensive areas I don't believe that they relate to tenant farmers. These are more likely to be with the landlord and may be in their records if they exist,
  I know that there are no McCollum records for his estates..
 Tenant farmers would have been signing a lease agreement with the Landlord, Not a title to the land , which would have been a Deed..
 From the Earl of Antrim's lease book, John McCollum leased the land of Aird Townland in 1668 and even from then, tenants would have been dealing with him.
Wyanga
 

[Elwyn Soutter]

Don’t assume that the word deed only means title to property. It has a much wider meaning. The Registry of Deeds contains a variety of types of documents. All generically referred to as deeds. There are sales, assignments, mortgages, marriage settlements, wills, bills of discovery but the most common are leases. There are hundreds of thousands of leases, often for tenant farmers. It may be that the McCollum estate has no records but if any of their deeds were registered (it wasn’t compulsory and there was a fee) then a copy could still exist. Strictly speaking they are called memorials and are transcripts of the original documents, occasionally abbreviated here and there.

In the early years the main leases tend to be for major transactions but as the years go by you see smaller parcels of land recorded.

Ian Montgomery (a member of PRONI’s staff) has also compiled a list of 17th century leases for the Antrim Estate (D2977 collection). So that pre-dates the Registry of Deeds. There’s 3 references to John McCollum of Cloghcorr in 1678 and in 1681. No Taylors, so they would be sub-tenants as you say.