This week’s Irish Recipe

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.

.

On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay –
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.

.

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May

.

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay –
When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.

.

The Story of “On Raglan Road” –

Lyrics written by Patrick Kavanagh,

Performed by Luke Kelly [1978]

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This Week’s Question:

How Do I Research an Ancestor Who Worked in the Irish Linen Industry?

Hi Tom,

Each week we take a reader question and share suggested approaches, resources and a little historical context to help answer that question.

Do feel free to reply to this email and let me know if it helped you in any way, it’s always great to get feedback.

Today we answer the question:

How Do I Research an Ancestor Who Worked in the Irish Linen Industry?

Let’s kick off with the following question from Frances:

“Dear Mike, I have been told the linen trade is in my blood, and it seems to be true. My great-great-grandfather James Reid was a handloom linen weaver near Lurgan in County Armagh. He and his family left Ireland for Lowell, Massachusetts, sometime around 1888, and several members of the family later worked in the textile mills there. I would dearly love to understand James’s working life in Ireland, but I cannot find anything that looks like a record of a weaver. Was anything kept about ordinary linen workers at all, and how would I go about researching a life spent at the loom?”

Frances, Lowell, Massachusetts

Thank you, Frances. The linen trade really was woven through the lives of an enormous number of Ulster families, and the area around Lurgan was right at the heart of it. But be careful with your expectations as there is no great register of Irish linen workers. A handloom weaver such as James is much less likely to appear by name in surviving business records than the merchant or manufacturer who gave him the work.

But that does not mean his working life has disappeared. In fact, once you know that he was a handloom linen weaver, you have a very useful clue. Between civil and church records, land records, directories, newspapers and some sources peculiar to the linen industry, you can often reconstruct a surprising amount of the world in which he lived.

First, Work Out Exactly What Your Ancestor Did

The linen industry was not one job but a long chain of them. It began with the farmers who grew and pulled the flax. Then came the scutchers and hacklers who prepared the fibre, the spinners who turned it into yarn, and the weavers who made the cloth. After weaving came bleaching, beetling and finishing, while drapers, manufacturers and merchants organised the trade and sold Irish linen around the world.

Picture was AI-generated by Tommy Mac

So the exact occupation written beside an ancestor’s name matters. In James’s case, “handloom weaver” is quite specific. In the later nineteenth century around Lurgan, a handloom weaver was still working on a manually operated loom, usually in his own home or in a small weaving shop. He might nevertheless be working for a large linen manufacturer who supplied the yarn and paid him for the cloth he produced. A “power loom weaver”, by contrast, worked in a mechanised weaving factory.

Other descriptions need more care. A record might simply say “linen weaver”, “weaver”, “cambric weaver” or “damask weaver”, and those terms do not necessarily tell you whether the loom was powered by hand or machinery. A flax spinner by James’s time was very likely working in a spinning mill, and the occupation was particularly associated with women and girls. Those little differences matter. Don’t improve or simplify the occupation when you put it into your family tree. Keep the wording the record actually gives you.

Start With the Last Irish Records You Can Find

This is where your James presents the problem familiar to so many people researching Irish ancestors: he had left Ireland before the surviving 1901 and 1911 censuses. So I would begin by working backwards from the family’s arrival in America and try to establish the latest definite sighting of James in Ireland.

Civil birth, marriage and death records can be extremely useful here. A marriage record may give James’s occupation and that of his father, while the birth registrations of his children can tell you whether he was still described as a weaver as late as the 1870s or 1880s.

For an Armagh family of this period, the free civil registration records at IrishGenealogy.ie are particularly useful. Although County Armagh is now in Northern Ireland, the IrishGenealogy.ie civil collection covers the whole island for the period before partition.

Do the same with church records. Around Lurgan you may be dealing with Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, Methodist or Roman Catholic families, and establishing the denomination can make a considerable difference to where you look next. That is one of the first things I would establish about James if you do not already know it.

Don’t Ignore the 1901 and 1911 Census Just Because James Had already left

James himself may be in Massachusetts by 1901, but his family and neighbours may still be sitting in the same County Armagh townland and that can be remarkably useful.

Look for brothers, sisters, cousins and married children who remained behind. Then look at their occupations. You may discover that James’s brother was still a handloom weaver in 1901 while his nieces were working as flax spinners or winders in a mill. Another relative may be recorded as a power loom weaver. Then widen the search to the neighbouring houses.

If a whole cluster of families around the old Reid home were working in linen, the census begins to show you the economic world from which James emigrated, even though James himself is no longer there. It is one of the reasons I would never treat the census simply as a search for one person. Sometimes the people who stayed behind tell you almost as much about the ancestor who left.

Find Where James and his family lived and worked

The next thing I would want to know is exactly where James lived. Griffith’s Valuation, carried out in County Armagh during the mid nineteenth century, can help identify the family holding or cottage and place it within a townland. But remember that Griffith’s does not normally give the occupation of an ordinary occupier. Finding a James Reid in a small house does not, by itself, prove that you have found your linen weaver.

For James’s period, the Valuation Revision Books at PRONI are even more useful. These continue the valuation records after Griffith’s and record changes in occupiers and properties over many decades. If you can identify the Reid cottage, you may be able to follow it through the period when James emigrated. You might see it pass to a brother, a son, another tenant or eventually disappear from the family’s hands.

Those changes rarely come with an explanation saying “went to America”, as you may imagine, but they can help narrow the period when something happened. Once you know the actual townland, you can begin asking better questions. How far was the nearest weaving factory? Was there a bleach works nearby? Which manufacturers operated in the district? Were the neighbouring households farming as well as weaving?

Follow the Manufacturer as Well as the Weaver

This is one of the peculiarities of researching a handloom weaver. James may have worked at a loom in his own cottage, but that does not necessarily mean he was an independent craftsman producing whatever he fancied. By the nineteenth century, many Ulster handloom weavers were tied into much larger manufacturing networks.

A manufacturer or linen merchant might supply the yarn, specify what was to be woven and pay the weaver for the finished piece. So although you are looking for James, it can be very worthwhile identifying the linen manufacturers operating around his townland.

Street and trade directories are useful here. They tend to name manufacturers, merchants, bleachers and mill owners rather than ordinary workers, but that is precisely why they can help. They tell you which businesses existed around Lurgan at the time James was weaving.

Then take those names to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. PRONI holds an enormous collection of records relating to the Ulster textile industry. Its catalogue, The Ulster Textile Industry 1690–1995, covers hundreds of textile businesses and includes material relating to spinning, weaving, bleaching, finishing and the commercial side of the trade.

Depending on the firm, surviving records can include ledgers, wage books, accounts, correspondence, production records and photographs. But I would say to keep your expectations realistic. These records were created to run businesses, not to help genealogists a century later. Some wage and staff books name ordinary workers; many company collections do not.

But even where James never appears by name, finding the records of the manufacturer for whom men in his district worked can tell you an enormous amount about how the trade operated.

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What Was Happening to James’s Trade?

This is where the timing of your family’s move becomes particularly interesting, Frances. You say James left Ireland around 1888, and he was doing so during a period of enormous change in the Ulster linen industry. Now, the linen industry itself wasn’t disappearing at the time, but the great mechanised linen industry of Belfast, Lurgan and the surrounding districts was expanding. So, what was under increasing pressure was James’s side of the business: handloom weaving.

Spinning had been mechanised much earlier in the century. Power weaving then expanded rapidly from the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and more and more cloth which once required a weaver sitting at a handloom could be produced by machinery in a factory. The handloom did not disappear overnight, but it survived in finer and more specialised forms of linen weaving, and there were still handloom weavers around Lurgan well into the twentieth century.

But for an ordinary family trying to make a living from the loom, the writing was on the wall. The modern factories were growing while the older domestic system was steadily losing ground. That means James’s occupation may be much more than a little detail on a certificate. It may also help explain what was happening to the family economically in the years before they left Ireland.

I would be careful not to turn that possibility into a fact – James may have left because his weaving income was falling. That was the push, but there may have also been a pull. He may equally have left because a brother or cousin was already in Massachusetts, because wages were better there, because somebody sent home the fare, or simply because he saw a better future for his children.

But once you know what was happening to handloom weaving around Lurgan, you have a very good question to investigate.

And Why Lowell?

The other side of your story is equally interesting. By the time the Reids arrived around 1888, Lowell had been one of America’s great textile cities for more than half a century. Tens of thousands of people worked in its mills, and Irish immigrants had been part of the city’s workforce since the first half of the nineteenth century.

There is one important difference, though. Lowell’s enormous factories were principally cotton mills, rather than the linen mills your family knew in Ulster. So I would not assume that James stepped off the boat and simply carried on doing the same job.

But he did move from one great textile district to another. A family accustomed to yarn, looms, piece work and the rhythms of textile production would have arrived in a city where factory work was plentiful and where Irish families had been settling for generations. An Ulster Protestant family would not have been as typical of Lowell’s nineteenth-century Irish population as the much larger Irish Catholic community, but neither would they have been especially unusual. There were Protestant and Presbyterian communities in Lowell and a much older tradition of Ulster Protestant settlement throughout Massachusetts and neighbouring New Hampshire.

What I would want to find next is the first American occupation for James and the rest of the family. Did James himself enter a mill? Did his sons and daughters do so while he found different work? Which company employed them? Were relatives already living in Lowell before 1888? The US census, city directories and Massachusetts vital records may begin answering those questions.

If you discover that another Reid from the same part of Armagh was already working in Lowell before James arrived, that may tell you far more about why the family chose Lowell than any general history of the linen industry ever could.

If You Want to Push the Linen Story Further Back

There is one special source worth knowing about if you eventually take the Reid family back into the eighteenth century. The 1796 Flax Growers’ Bounty List, sometimes called the Spinning Wheel Premium List, contains the names of around 56,000 people across Ireland who received spinning wheels or looms as premiums for growing flax.

The entries generally give a name, county and civil parish. But there is an important warning  – finding a Reid on this list does not prove that he was a professional weaver, the scheme rewarded flax growing. But if you find the right family in the right Armagh parish, it may show that flax had already formed part of the family’s economy almost a century before James sat at his handloom. And that is when Frances’s remark about the linen trade being “in the blood” begins to get very interesting indeed.

So, if I were in your shoes, I would start by finding James’s last definite record in Ireland and keeping a careful note of every occupation attached to him. Then find the family home, look at the relatives who remained there in 1901 and 1911, and work out which linen businesses operated around them.

After that, I would cross the Atlantic and do exactly the same thing in Lowell.

Slán for now,

Mike

Useful Resources

Census of Ireland 1901 and 1911 – National Archives of Ireland

Best for: finding the relatives and neighbours who remained in Ireland after your ancestor emigrated, and seeing the occupations within a linen-working community.

IrishGenealogy.ie – Civil Records

Best for: free civil birth, marriage and death records for the whole island during the period relevant to a family leaving Ireland in the nineteenth century. Occupations recorded on these certificates can help follow a worker through the years before emigration.

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland – PRONI

Best for: the major collections relating to Ulster families, landholding, businesses and the linen industry.

PRONI Valuation Revision Books

Best for: following a house or holding after Griffith’s Valuation and seeing changes of occupier through the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Ulster Textile Industry 1690–1995 – PRONI

Best for: finding surviving records of linen spinning, weaving, bleaching and manufacturing businesses.

PRONI Street Directories 1819–1900

Best for: identifying linen manufacturers, merchants, mills and other businesses operating in the district where your ancestor lived.

Griffith’s Valuation – Ask About Ireland

Best for: placing a family in a particular house, farm or townland during the middle of the nineteenth century.

1796 Flax Growers’ Bounty List – Ulster Historical Foundation

Best for: tracing families involved in flax growing in the late eighteenth century. An entry indicates involvement in flax production, not proof that the person was a professional spinner or weaver.

The Green Room – Your Irish Heritage

Best for: getting help applying these sources to your own family and comparing your research with others tracing ancestors from Ireland’s linen districts.

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