Luke Dalton : Short Biography

My gggrandparents were Luke & Anna (Qualey) Dalton who, before and during the period of the Great Famine, lived on and farmed a 4-acre plot on the slopes of Coumaraglin Mountain in Kilgobnet Parish of County Waterford. That plot, along with two much larger adjacent ones, were actually held by Anna's father, John Qualey (b. ~ 1790), who had been the rent-paying tenant of record for those plots dating back to at least the 1820's. Title to all arable farmed plots and the rest of Coumaraglin Mountain (totaling to 2,474 acres), and much of Kilgobnet Parish land, belonged to Lord Cremorne, to whom my Dalton and Qualey ancestors paid rent, out of proceeds from harvested crops. It was a near starvation existence. Interestingly, several years ago my internet research led me to a fascinating 1844 transcription document (verbatim, or very close to it) of verbal testimony given to the House of Lords in Parliament on October 7, 1844 by one of Lord Cremorne's "land agents" (rent enforcers) in County Waterford, possibly an agent known to my ancestors. He describes at length the difficult life and precarious existence of such tenants, including the fact that after paying Lord Cremorne the proceeds of crop sales as "rent", they had to "borrow" money from him, via his land agent, to pay for the meager amount of food of their bare subsistence. The interest rate was 6% and, as time passed, the tenant's debt eventually grew to the point that ever paying it off was hopeless, thus begetting this testimony in the House of Lords over "concern" for the debts(!) ultimately never getting repaid.

Luke & Anna Dalton had four children who eventually emigrated to the US in the mid-1860's, two sons and two daughters. One was my great-grandfather and namesake, William J. Dalton (1851-1901), who settled in the Berkshire Mountains area of western Massachusetts. He met and married an Irish immigrant from County Meath, Mary Carroll, and they raised four children, 2 girls and 2 boys. For decades, the couple worked together as the caretaker and lead housemaid of a leading industrial tycoon's huge estate in Lenox.