Emigration

Why they left

Ulster Presbyterians left for the New World partly to escape the Sacramental Test and their exclusion from public life, described in Chapter III. That is one valid view, but there were other factors just as important. Many of the cheap leases that had drawn Scots to Ulster a century earlier were expiring, and landlords raised rents steeply. Bad harvests and slumps in the linen trade added to the pressure. By the middle of the century many thousands of Ulster people were crossing the Atlantic every year.

1718: the first great emigration

The first great emigration of Ulster Scots, almost all Presbyterian, came in 1718. The best-known group left the Bann valley in County Londonderry and founded the town of Londonderry in New Hampshire. A large group from the Laggan, where Burt Presbyterian church stands, followed close behind and settled around Casco Bay in Maine, then part of Massachusetts.

The Laggan already had a link to America. Francis Makemie, who preached at Burt in 1682, went on to found the Presbyterian church in America, and families from the congregations he knew followed the same road.

Several McCorkells emigrated in the 1720s, and others in every decade after. If my own family is anything to go by, there was a steady stream that continued until the early 1900s. Philadelphia appears to have been the family's favourite port of entry, from the mid-1700s until the early decades of the twentieth century.

What the DNA tells us about the emigrants

Where the ship lists fail, the Y-DNA helps. Men descended from these eighteenth-century emigrants have tested with the McCorkle surname study, and their results match those of McCorkells still in Ireland. Their earliest known ancestors include:

The pattern is the classic Scots-Irish one: landing at Philadelphia, settling first in Pennsylvania, then moving down the Great Wagon Road into the Carolinas and on to Tennessee. Several of these men share SNP mutations, BY72575 and BY156610, that mark them as one American branch descended from a single emigrant ancestor. An Alexander McCorkle of Northern Ireland, b. 1725, d. 1780, sits on a separate branch, as I expect the Donegal lines will. A Big Y test of a Donegal McCorkell would show where the Irish and American lines divide. See Chapter VI.

A thought of America, 1783

The Abercorn estate letters give a rare glimpse of the decision to leave. In May 1783 the agent, discussing William McCorkill's sale of his farm at Cloughfin, noted that young men from the district were taking linen and other goods to America and some tradesmen were going to settle there, but doubted McCorkill would go, as he was an elderly man.

Arrivals at Philadelphia

Philadelphia's own records list several McCorkells among the passengers landing there in the early nineteenth century:

The lists do not say where the passengers came from, but most ships into Philadelphia in these years sailed from Ulster ports, Londonderry among them.

The passenger books

By the nineteenth century records improve. The Derry shipping agents kept passenger books recording each emigrant's name, residence, passage money and the "earnest" paid to secure a berth.

To Australia

In the nineteenth century Australia became a destination too. One family is known through a descendant who wrote to me some years ago. William McCorkell was born at Buncrana about 1834, the son of Joseph McCorkell and Rebecca Cook. He went to Victoria, married Martha Hart, who was born in 1844, and died at Macedon, Victoria, in 1899. Martha died in 1920.

Joseph McCorkell married Rebecca Cook at Fahan Lower Church of Ireland, Buncrana, on 8 February 1825. Their sons included Samuel (1832), John (1836) and William (1 April 1838), so William may have been a few years younger than his family believed. The Flax Growers' list of 1796 has a James and a William McCorkell in the parish of Fahan Upper, the Buncrana district, and Joseph may well descend from one of them. Victorian death certificates are unusually detailed, often naming the deceased's parents, birthplace and years in the colony, so William's certificate of 1899 is the best place to start. If you know more about Joseph and Rebecca, I would be glad to hear from you.

A family of three siblings who landed at Melbourne on the City of Agra in February 1871 may be theirs: Elizabeth, aged 38, John, 35, and William, 30. John's age matches the John born in 1836, and passenger ages were often rounded. If so, William reached Victoria in 1871 and married Martha Hart there.

Samuel McCorkell and the lost Lydia

An Australian correspondent has traced another family. James McCorkell and Martha Clarke had a son Andrew, born in 1796, who married Lydia McIlheney. Their children included James (1824), John David (1826), Robert (1828) and Samuel (1830), with five more after. The 1831 census of County Londonderry finds Andrew at Ballynagard, in the Liberties of the city, and family notes say he went to Canada in 1857. A 1861 census of Quebec lists an Andrew McCorkell, born 1797, at St Dunstan, with a Julia born in 1800, perhaps Lydia misread.

Samuel went the other way. He and his wife, Margaret Jane Smith, born in 1837, came out as assisted immigrants on the Poictiers, landing at Melbourne in January 1854, aged 23 and 17. Their daughter Lydia was born in Victoria in 1855, and Samuel died in 1856. No death is registered for Lydia; what became of her is the family's lost link. A Catherine McCorkell, born 1835, the only other assisted McCorkell immigrant to Victoria, landed from the Black Eagle in October 1854, and may have been Samuel's sister.

A family history compiled by Andrew and Lydia's descendants follows their grandchildren across three continents. In Canada, Margaret McCorkell was born at Quebec in 1861, and James in 1868; James was baptised at St Andrew's Presbyterian Church, Quebec, and again at the Anglican church of Stoneham and Lake Beauport, the parish where the 1861 census found Andrew. That baptism makes it all but certain that the census's "Julia" was Lydia. Another branch farmed at Singhampton in Ontario, where Sarah Lydia McCorkell was born in 1869, carrying her grandmother's name, followed by Anna Jane (1872), William Andrew (1876), Alexander (1882), Margaret (1884) and Jeannetta (1887). Most of them moved on to Oregon, Washington and Idaho; Sarah Lydia died at Pendleton, Oregon, about 1960, and James at Lewiston, Idaho, in 1946.

In Melbourne, a branch of the family that came out after Samuel was settled at South Yarra and Hotham by 1869. Samuel George McCorkell, born at South Yarra in 1869, was a clerk; Robert Claude (1876–1934) worked for The Age; Ethel Sarah was born in 1877 and Norman Harold in 1882. The family remained in Victoria through the twentieth century.

Other McCorkells landing in Victoria

George Magee McCorkell was very probably a son of the younger Archibald McCorkell of Derry and Elizabeth Chambers Magee, whose son was born in Shipquay Street in February 1859, so the Shipping McCorkells sent a branch to Australia too. Another Eliza or Elizabeth McCorkell, born in the 1820s, married George Stewart in Victoria and had a daughter Mary in 1849.

The families of the nineteenth century, including the Ballyrattan McCorkells who went to Boston, Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia, and the Loughgilly brothers who sailed for Philadelphia in 1851–53 and homesteaded in Minnesota and Iowa, are followed in Chapter V.

Sources

1. McCorkle Surname DNA Study and Little Scottish Cluster project, FamilyTreeDNA.
2. Abercorn estate papers, PRONI (D623).
3. Derry shipping passenger books, PRONI.
4. Passenger Arrivals at the Port of Philadelphia, 1800–1819.
5. Victorian immigration and registration records, compiled by an Australian correspondent.