Looking for info. on ancestors from townland of Straboe.

Straboe townland consists of 1104 acres of mainly agricultural land. Griffiths Valuation (1852) lists about 10 farms there, together with some cottages. The only Nolan household was a John Nolan on plot 5b which was an agricultural labourers cottage on James Byrne?s farm.

http://www.askaboutireland.ie/griffith-valuation/index.xml?action=nameSearch

The tithe applotment records for Straboe townland date to 1833. There were 22 farms there at that time. Again none held by anyone named Nolan. (Only those with land were listed, so agricultural labourers, servants and others without land don?t get a mention).

http://titheapplotmentbooks.nationalarchives.ie/search/tab/home.jsp

Based on this limited analysis, I suspect that your ancestors were not farmers, and were probably working as agricultural labourers on one of the farms in the townland. Sometimes their rent was paid in cash or partially in cash, but usually it was paid by an agreed number of days work per year on the farm, after which the person was free to take any other work that might be available. A barter economy and pretty much a hand to mouth existence. Provided they could raise the fare they were the first to emigrate for obvious economic reasons. There was little spare land. (The population of Ireland shot up from 3 million in 1741 to 8 million in 1841. There just wasn?t the land or employment for that number of people. The population is still only 6 million today). Most agricultural labourers had a small strip given to them by the farmer on which they grew a few crops, nearly always potatoes. The Irish soil is particularly well suited to growing potatoes and you can grow more of them on a piece of land than any other crop. So if land is in short supply, then people favoured that above any other, and often grew nothing else. Potatoes are also low maintenance and that made them popular too. But being one crop dependant is risky, and potatoes exhaust the soil quite quickly too. Unfortunately, potato blight also attacked the potato crop a number of times throughout the 19^th century leading to partial crop failures. The worst years were the big famine of 1846 -1 848 when it failed 3 years in a row and people had to eat their seed potatoes and this led to starvation, disease and 2 million deaths.  So there was a huge surge in emigration at that time, but the reality was that people had been pouring out of Ireland all through the 1800s, for the economic reasons I have outlined. All the famine did was speed that up.

Carlow public library probably has some local studies sources on life in the county in the 1800s. You might want to contact them to see if they can recommend further reading on the subject.