Ancestors married in Meath

Anne,

I can?t give you any specific information about your family but I can give you a little general background that may help give you a broad idea of life at the time, which I think is what you are interested in.

Firstly you ask whether they live din the immediate area. Church law required that at least one party be resident in the parish. So yes they were most probably both local to that parish. The normal method of transport in the 1840s was on foot, so your radius of courtship was controlled by how far you were prepared to walk. A saying in Co. Fermanagh was that you usually married someone within an ?asses bark? of where you lived (ie how far away you could hear a donkey?s call, say half a mile). I?d say that was fairly typical. (Bicycles arrived in rural Ireland in the 1860s and I have read that the increased mobility they offered led to a correspondingly wider pattern of marriages).

Most of Ireland was agricultural land of varying quality. Most people worked on farms. If the father had a small farm, then the son would help him on the farm. If there was no family farm then he would work as an agricultural labourer for someone who did have a farm. The majority of farms were small (just a few acres). This was rarely full time employment for agricultural labourers, and so if not needed on the farms he might get other work that came along eg road building, and in some parts of Ireland there would be linen weaving (on a handloom, in the cottage). Women rarely had paid employment and they just helped around the home and farm. They?d assist the men planting and lifting crops and bringing in the harvest etc, and with any weaving. At other times they?d sew and do other chores. Cows always needed to be milked, eggs collected etc.  It was mostly a barter economy, with little cash.

Ireland has very few natural resources (no oil, coal, iron ore etc) and so did not benefit from the industrial revolution in the 1800s, the way Scotland, England, the US, Canada & Australia did, which created hundreds of thousands of comparatively well-paid new jobs in new industries (coal mining, steel making, ship building etc). So that was a big pull factor in Irish people?s decisions to emigrate. There had also been a huge population explosion in Ireland going up from about 3 million people in 1750 to 8 million in 1830. There simply weren?t the jobs for all those people. In much of Ireland the only employment was subsistence farming topped up in some parts with a bit of weaving. And then the straw that broke the camel?s back, along came the famine, numerous times throughout the 1800s. The worst period was when the potato crop failed almost completely 3 years in a row in the late 1840s, and then partially several more years after that. Many farmers were very much one crop dependant, because you could grow more potatoes to the acre than any other crop, but as a consequence they had nothing else to fall back on, and because it was largely a barter economy they mostly had no spare cash to buy food. When the crop failed 3 years in a row, people ended up eating their seed potatoes, leaving them nothing to plant the next spring. It is estimated that during the years 1845 to 1850, around 800,000 people died of starvation or of a famine-related disease such as typhus, dysentery, scurvy or pellagra. A further two million people emigrated. Unlike earlier famines, in which the population recovers quickly from the catastrophe and continues to grow, the after- effects of the Great Irish Famine were such that the population of Ireland, standing at 8.2 million people in 1841, declined to 6.6 million in 1851. Fifty years later, Ireland's population was still showing a decline (down to 4.5 million), even though every other European country was showing a population increase. Ireland?s population did not return to its pre-famine heights until 1964. Approximately 8 million people left Ireland between 1801 and 1900 - the equivalent of the entire pre-Famine population. The population today is only around 6 million.

Elwyn

Hi Elwyn, thank you very much for your response. It  was  very helpful.

Anne30