Samuel Harper - Believe Killyramer, Antrim County, Northern Ireland

Ron,

A major problem you face is that there are almost no records for Co Antrim for the early 1700s. So it will be very difficult finding much out about this family.

The oldest records for the area around Ballymoney are the 1740 protestant census which list just 1 Harper household, headed by Robert Harper. (Your Samuel may well have been in the US by that year of course). In the 1766 census there was again 1 household in the parish of Ballymoney (which includes Killyramer) headed by John Harper. In the 1803 agricultural census there was 1 in the parish of Ballymoney. He was Daniel and lived in the townland of Calhame. He was the only 1 in that immediate area but there were 3 others in the northern part of Co. Antrim. None in Killyramer. Moving forward to the 1901 census, Killyramer had 17 houses and a total population of 60. None named Harper.

Your ancestors were Presbyterian and lived in the north of Co Antrim. Consequently it’s fairly certain that their ancestors came from Scotland and settled in the area sometime in the 1600s.  Something between 100,000 and 200,000 Scots settled in Ireland then. There was a particularly big wave of arrivals in the 1690s due to famine in Scotland.  By 1718 some of them were dis-satisfied with life in Ireland and started to move again to North America. Here’s a link that explains a bit of the background:

https://www.ancestryireland.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/The_1718_Migration.pdf

So if Samuel was born in 1715, his family may only have lived in Ireland for anywhere between 30 and 100 years. Just 2 or 3 generations.

The vast majority of the Scots settlers were Presbyterian but only about 2 Presbyterian churches in the whole county have any records for 1715 (neither is anywhere near Ballymoney). The whole Ballymoney area is devoid of church records for the 1700s. There may have been some for the early 1700s at one time but the town of Ballymoney was burned down in the 1798 United Irish uprising and, save for a few fragments for the 1760s, all the Presbyterian church records were lost.

So there is no documentary evidence to search of who lived in Killyramer in 1715. I can confirm that there was at least 1 Harper family in the area in 1740 and a handful thereafter. But I cannot think of any source which might allow us to find where Samuel was born. Thousands of Presbyterians from that area did migrate to North America in the 1700s and so he could well have come from Co Antrim all right, and perhaps from Killramer.

I hope this is of some help.