Andrew and Jean Reed emigrated ~1745 from Antrim (Donegore?)

Bob,

Donegore is not a town. It’s a rural parish about 3 miles outside Antrim town. Made up largely of agricultural land. 6500 acres across 18 townlands. According to the Ordnance Survey memoirs in 1839, four fifths of the population of Donegore then were Presbyterian (indicating Scottish origins).  The writer commented:

“Their dialect, particularly in the more remote parts of the parish, is strongly Scottish, as are also their idioms and old saws, which are very quaint and pithy, and plainly indicate their extraction.”

Millrow (nowadays known as Antrim 1st Presbyterian church) is very unusual in having records for the late 1600s. Their records start in 1677 (which is around the time the first Presbyterian churches were being built in Ireland). Very very few churches in Ireland have records for the 1600s so you are extremely lucky to have found this 1694 marriage. The 2 families may only have been living in Ireland for a generation or so. Something like 200,000 Scots settled in Ireland in the 1600s, and Co Antrim being so close to Scotland was particularly heavily populated by them. A lot came from Ayrshire (just 20 miles away) but many came from other counties in Scotland too. Generally from lowland areas rather than the Scottish Highlands.

Presbyterianism was established in Scotland in the 1500s and brought to Ireland by Scots settlers in the 1600s which, in part, is why there are no earlier records.  They hadn’t arrived. Presbyterians in Ireland don’t normally keep burial records and there are certainly none for Donegore in the early 1700s. Very few gravestones survive from that period too.

Apart from the church records that you already have, I’d be surprised if there's anything else to find about this couple from records in Ireland. But at least you know roughly where they lived and they spoke with Scotch accents.

Researching in Ireland in the 1700s is very hard going due to the general lack of records. If you don’t know where they lived it’s a needle in a haystack. Ideally you need to know the person’s exact denomination and the townland or parish they lived in to have any chance of finding them, and even then there may not be any records for that location.

Possibly DNA testing may be a way of matching with others who have additional information about where the family originate. Family Tree DNA reportedly has more people with Ulster roots than any other company. That obviously increases the chances of finding a match. You might want to try them or, if you have already tested, you can transfer your results to them for no fee.

The North of Ireland Family History Society is running an Ulster DNA project in conjunction with FTDNA and can offer testing kits at a reduced price.  http://www.nifhs.org (Go to DNA project on the website).

I appreciate the quick (and thorough) response.  The only other info I have is that Jean's father, John Murray, died in 1728 as a resident of Carrickfergus (from a civil probate record from Connor).

Bob,

Yes you probably need to be a bit careful there with the probate information.  All those pre 1858 probate indexes tell you is that someone named John Murray of Carrickfergus had a will probated in 1728. There’s no easy way of knowing whether it’s your family because no other information is available now. (The will itself was burned in the 1922 fire in Dublin). Murray is a very common name in Co Antrim. Looking at the 1901 census, there were 1720 people named Murray in the county of which 129 were named John Murray. So a strong statistical possibility it’s not your family, I would say. 

To require probate in 1728 would suggest someone with a lot of land, a wealthy businessman or large property owner in Carrickfergus. Not a labourer or small farmer 20 miles away in Donegore which is pretty much the only employment in that area. But I could be wrong.

Here’s a general description of Donegore, again taken from the OS Memoirs in 1839 (but it wouldn’t be so different from 1700: “This parish is almost exclusively an agricultural district. It is inhabited by 307 families (1701 individuals) of which 180 families are chiefly employed in agriculture and 73 are employed in trade, manufactures and handicraft. There are 107 agricultural labourers, 2 labourers not employed in agriculture and 38 female servants; 849 are males and 852 are females.

The farms consist of from 7 to 30 acres, and a further idea may be informed of their extent from the circumstances of there being 151 occupiers of land who do not employ labourers and only 26 who do.

Except in its southern district, agriculture is in a rather backward state as regards the actual culture of the ground, but still there are striking indications of a civilised and improving people to be found in the modern cart and other farming implements; nor is the low backed Irish car, with its primitive harness, so common in retired and mountainous districts, ever to be seen here.”

So what’s being described is a fairly modest agricultural area where the wealthiest folk were small farmers but even then many of them could not afford to employ permanent labourers. There were no gentlemen’s seats in the parish and I’d be surprised if many of the population would have needed probate. Most estates could be wound up then without it. Most assets were cash or movable, eg tools or cattle, and the family could administer that without a probate grant (as is still the case today for some small value estates).