Smyth Family History By David SmythVersion 8: December
3, 2004 NOTE: This
updated version now includes: New
information at Generation 3, on the sons of Thomas Smyth
and Margaret Lightfoot, and the origin of the Smyth coats
of arms New
information on Generations 10 and 11, Thomas Hutchinson
Smyth, who died in 1830, and his offspring Arthur M.D.
and Edward, the banker. New
information in Appendix 4, on the ancestry of William
Smithdike Appendix
6, the Australian descendants of Arthur Smyth
Introduction This is the history of our small branch of the Smyth family, as far as I have been able to piece it together from various sources. It traces my Smyth ancestors back through my grandfather Thomas Hutchinson Smyth (1851-1931) to his forebears in Ireland and northern England. It covers twelve generations to my grandfather (fourteen to me, sixteen to the youngest Smyth generation now living), and a period of about five hundred years. This is as far back as I have been able to track the Smyth line so far. However, it is a work in progress, and further information will be added as more facts come to light. The current version, dated December 3, 2004, will, I hope, be superseded by later editions as my research continues.
In the early 1600s, one ancestor, Ralph Smyth, married
Elizabeth Hawksworth of Hawksworth Hall, Yorkshire. The
Hawksworth family can be traced back for at least another
four hundred years, through seventeen generations, to a
Robert de Hawksworth who lived in Yorkshire in the early
Thirteenth century. (See the Hawksworth appendix). We thus
have about eight hundred years of recorded family
history. That looks impressive. But to put the matter in
its proper perspective: excluding the single exception of
the Hawksworth connection, the ancestry is traced only
through the male line of descent, which severely limits
the scope of the inquiry. It is probably just as well,
since genealogical research through both male and female
lines quickly becomes buried in a mass of unmanageable
data. This is due to the inescapable fact that everybody
has two parents, four grandparents, eight
great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and
so on back into the mists of time. If there are no
overlapping ancestors along the way through
intermarriage, by the time you go back five hundred years
and sixteen generations (one generation being usually
estimated at about thirty years) everybody alive in the
year 2003 had 131,072 direct ancestors around the year
1500. And if you go back one thousand years, each person
could theoretically have had more than 107 million
ancestors about the year 1066, when the battle of
Hastings was fought. Since the population of England at
that time was probably not more than a couple of million
or so, it is obvious that there must have been a lot of
overlapping ancestors between the Tenth and Twentieth
centuries.
It is equally obvious that a family tree which lists a
single ancestor (say Robert de Hawksworth of Hawksworth
Hall) around the year 1227 is concentrating its attention
on perhaps less than a millionth part of its total gene
pool. This is the inevitable result of going back only
through the male line. Your father has half your genes,
your grandfather one quarter, your great grandfather one
eighth, your great-great-grandfather one sixteenth, and
so on, back to one quadrillionth or one zillionth by the
time you get all the way back to Adam. Indeed, if you go
far enough back in time everybody in the world is related
to everybody else. However, as my friend Santiago Ferrari
used to argue, “People say: Well, we are all
descended from monkeys anyway. But what I say is: Yes,
but not from the same monkey.”
So tracing a family tree from father to son is something
like boring an exploratory oil well. The earth cores that
come up through the pipe for examination are only minute
samples from the successive geological strata lying down
there in the vast darkness of the past. But the sample
cores can occasionally bring up some intriguing nuggets
of information. At one point in the late 1700s it seems
that our branch of the Smyths may have lost a castle in
Ireland to the legal maneuvering of one Maggie Gerity and
her possibly bastard son Robert Smyth. And in the 1500s,
a Hawksworth aunt and uncle appear to have murdered their
niece and nephew to take over Hawksworth Hall and the
family estate. The murderous uncle was our direct
ancestor. The murderous aunt and the murdered children
were not.
Well, there is nothing to be done about the castle or the
murders or anything else now that all those centuries
have gone by. And the Smyths have branched off in all
directions since the 1500s. There are 13,813 Smyth
households around the world, according to the editor of a
Smyth genealogical book who recently contacted me. So,
when I refer to “our” ancestors, the tight
structure of this family tree limits the term
“our” as applying to the descendants of my
grandfather Thomas Hutchinson Smyth. This is a
fluctuating number of people over the years - currently
about a dozen and a half now living who are descended
from the offspring of Thomas Hutchinson Smyth. He had
five sons, Alan (1892-1960), Bertie (1894-1966), Currell
(1896-1972), Dermot (1898-1991), and Tom (1901-1965), all
of whom are now dead. Dermot and Tom died unmarried.
Alan, Bertie and Currell had children.
The descendants of Alan now living are June Leonard, her
daughter Mary Trevelyan, and her grand-daughter Sharon
Trevelyan. The descendants of Bertie still alive at the
turn of the century were his daughter Cleone Smyth; his
grandson Richard, and Richard’s sons Nyall and
Stuart; Bertie’s grand-daughter Elaine, and
Elaine’s children Laura, Peter, Nicholas and Angus
Marshall; Bertie’s grandson Alec, and Alec’s
daughter Frances; Currell’s son David and grandson
Clifford Smyth. So there are sixteen people in this
branch of the family whose genes may be traced back to
the earliest identifiable Smyth in the 1500s. To which
are added the people related to them by marriage who have
a vested interest in this family tree, having contributed
genes from England, Scotland, Spain and Germany (Betty
Dixon, Alison Peebles-Brown, Nigel Trevelyan, Gavin
Marshall, Silvia Lopez and Elli Helene Düsterhöft).
How Reliable is this Family
Tree? The first
question that arises of course is the accuracy of the
data. Just how reliable is the information in this family
tree? In general terms, the more recent it is, the more
reliable it looks, since much of it is supported by
original documents. I have my own birth certificate, the
birth certificate of my father (Currell Hutchinson
Smyth, born in Bernal, Buenos Aires Province, July 29,
1896) and the birth and baptismal records of his four
brothers, Alan, Bertie, Dermot and Tom. I also have the
birth record of my grandfather, as well as the rather
illegible certificate (Thomas Hutchinson Smyth, born
in Londonderry 13 Aug. 1851). My grandfather’s
birth record was located by the Ulster Historical
Foundation, which also verified the marriage of his
father (my great-grandfather) Edward Smyth to Elizabeth
Wallace in Downpatrick May 18, 1843. This parish
marriage registry appears to be the earliest original
family record that we have at this time.
Going back from that date I have had to rely on other,
probably less trustworthy, sources. The first of these is
a family tree either made by my grandfather Thomas H.
Smyth himself, or commissioned by him, probably in the
early 1900s. It traces the family line back to a William
Smyth of Rosedale Abbey, Yorkshire, who moved to Dundrum,
Ireland, in the early 1600s. It is notably lacking in
specific dates of birth, marriage and death. This made me
suspect that the data probably came from wills that
mentioned sons and daughters as heirs, without specifying
their dates of birth or marriage or death. Or perhaps
some unethical genealogist had just concocted a
collection of spurious details for my grandfather and
charged him a lot of money for very little work.
In late 2000 I decided to verify my grandfather’s
material by commissioning the Ulster Historical
Foundation (UHF) to make a genealogical study of our
branch of the Smyth surname. I provided their researchers
with my grandfather’s family tree as a basis for
them to work on. The UHF made what seemed to me a
remarkably thorough investigation, and the report it sent
me in early 2001 came up with a lot of corroborative
detail. It dug up documents I did not have - the birth
record and certificate of my grandfather Thomas H. Smyth
(born in Londonderry 13 August, 1851) and the
birth certificate of his wife Emma Jane Stephens (born
in Dublin November 23, 1864), as well as the marriage
record of her parents (George Alexander Stephens and
Selina Bell, married in Abbeyleix, November 25, 1857).
The UHF also found a number of other original records
that tended to confirm the general accuracy of my
grandfather’s family tree, including the marriage of
his father Edward in 1843.
The UHF suggested, however, that the data contained in
his family tree probably came not from family wills as I
suspected but from published works, such as Burke’s History
of the Landed Gentry of Ireland and Burke’s Irish
Family Records. They sent me xeroxed pages of these
publications, which do indeed appear to be the source of
the somewhat barebones details given in my
grandfather’s family tree. (See Family Tree Appendix
for the complete text of this document).
This is what the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature
says about Burke’s Irish genealogical reference
works: "Burke's Landed Gentry of Ireland
(1st edition. 1899), is a genealogical dictionary of
Irish landowning families, published by the company
established by John Burke (I787-1848), compiler of A
Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and
Baronage of the United Kingdom (1st edition. 1826). The
sole criterion was ownership of 1,000 acres in Ireland.
Most of the names listed belong to ascendancy families,
though not all were Protestant and not all were titled.
Following the Wyndham Land Act in 1903 the editors were
forced to ask if there were still a landed gentry, as
noted in the 1912 Preface. After a fourth edition in 1958
the work was reissued as Burke's Irish Family Records
(1976), listing the descendants of `500 interesting
dynasties', whether living in Ireland or settled
abroad."
My grandfather’s family tree begins with this entry: WILLIAM
SMYTH of Dundrum, County Down. Settled in Ireland from
Rosedale Abbey, County York, England, in the reign of
King James I (1603-1625). Married Mary, daughter of John
Dowdall of Glashisbell, County Louth.
The 1899 edition of Burke’s Landed Gentry of Ireland
has this, almost identical, entry for the Smyth family of
Gaybrook, County Westmeath: WILLIAM
SMYTH, of Dundrum, County Down, settled in Ireland from
Rosedale Abbey, County York, temp. James I, 1630. He
married Mary, daughter of John Dowdall, of Glaspistell,
County Louth (by Anne his wife, daughter of Sir Thomas
Cusack, Lord Chancellor of Ireland).
Burke’s Landed Gentry then mentions a
granddaughter of William, named Marjorie, who married a
Richard Currell. A couple of generations later, in the
early 1700s, we have a Rev. Currell Smyth listed in the
family, with Currell now used as a given name as well as
a surname. Currell is very unusual as a given name, and
the fact that my grandfather bestowed it on my father
Currell Hutchinson Smyth in 1896 makes me think that he
was probably familiar with the 1890s editions of
Burke’s Landed Gentry of Ireland. He
himself bore the middle name Hutchinson in honor of a
family related by marriage to the Smyths and passed it on
to all his five sons. We must
face now the matter of reliability. How trustworthy are
Burke’s publications as a source of genealogical
data? Unfortunately, in this particular case Burke
appears to start out with an error in the very first
generation. The 1899 edition of The Landed Gentry of
Ireland states that William Smyth’s second son
was also called William, was also of Dundrum, and also
married Mary Dowdall. It seems improbable that both
father and son should have married a Mary Dowdall. And in
fact this is explicitly amended in a later edition of
Burke’s Irish Family Records, published more
than seventy years later. According
to the Irish Family Records: WILLIAM
SMYTH, came to Ireland from Rossdale (sic) Abbey circa
1630, settled first at Dundrum, County Down, but later
moved to Lisburn, County Antrim. Married Ann (died ante
1630), daughter of Sir Thomas Hewley, and aunt of Sir
John Hewley, Member of Parliament for Yorkshire, and died
1650. So it turns
out that Mary Dowdall was not the wife of our ancestor
William Smyth, but his daughter-in-law, and in this
particular generation we are descended in the female line
from Hewleys rather than from Dowdalls. How did
this error come about? Burke’s publications contain
such a mass of genealogical data for hundreds of families
over hundreds of years that it is quite evidently beyond
the capabilities of the editors to research them all
themselves. I would say they probably do little original
research, if any at all. Instead, the editors most likely
have to rely on the families themselves to volunteer
whatever they have in the way of ancestral information
and accept uncritically whatever is thus provided. What
it comes down to then is that each family listed is the
source for its own genealogy and should be looked at
skeptically for any tendency to self-aggrandizement. What
appears to have happened in this case is that the Smyth
family of Gaybrook used the seventy-odd years after 1899
to dig a little deeper and make some corrections in the
family records. Since Mary Dowdall was no longer their
(and our) direct ancestress there is no longer any
mention here of her being the grand-daughter of the Lord
Chancellor of Ireland. The family record apparently
benefited also from some new research that extended the
Smyth history a further hundred years, from the William
Smyth who moved to Ireland in 1630, back to his
great-grandfather Thomas Smyth, born in West Layton,
Yorkshire, in 1520. So we know
more or less where we stand as regards Burke’s
genealogical records. They are not all that reliable. We
return now to my great-grandfather Edward Smyth, whose
wedding on May 18, 1843 marks the earliest event anchored
by original documentation. Everything before that event
stands on a lower level of credibility. In fact, however,
all the father-to-son successions recorded in my
grandfather’s family tree seem to be duly confirmed
by the genealogy given in Burke’s reference works,
back to Ralph Smyth, son of the William Smyth of Rosedale
Abbey, Yorkshire who moved to Dundrum, County Down. So my
grandfather seems to have got all that right at least.
But, as we have seen, Burke appears to have been his
source material, and Burke does make mistakes. Another of
these mistakes is the statement that William Smyth moved
to Ireland in 1630, temp James I. King James died
in 1625, and if William did settle in Ireland in 1630, it
was in the reign of Charles I. The Ulster
Historical Foundation is careful to limit its research to
original documents (civil and religious registers of
birth, marriage and death) and other documentary sources
such as biographies, government reports, newspaper
articles published at the time, and other contemporary
records. Unfortunately civil records of births, deaths
and Catholic marriages in Ireland did not begin until
1864, and the civil registration of Protestant marriages
only started in 1845. Before these dates the UHF can only
provide copies of baptismal or marriage records in church
registers. How far back these records go varies from
parish to parish, and there is always the possibility
that the UHF may perhaps not find some records that
actually do exist. The parish records are scattered all
over the country, and the UHF, not having the information
available all in one place, may not know where to look. Fortunately,
however, the UHF’s information can be supplemented
by the research service of the Church of Latter Day
Saints – the Mormon Church. The Mormons believe that
when you become a Mormon you find salvation not only for
yourself, you can also save your ancestors by baptizing
them posthumously into the Mormon religion. It is
therefore important to Mormons to know precisely who
their ancestors are, and they have embarked on a vast
project of gathering the records of birth, marriage and
death of ultimately everybody in the world.
Much of this information is available on their website,
and it is not necessary to be a Mormon to discover its
usefulness in genealogical research. For
example, it was during a search of the Mormon website
that I found a record of the marriage of Edward Smith
(sic) and Elizabeth Wallace in Downpatrick on May 18,
1843. I passed the information on to the UHF, and they
confirmed its accuracy by checking the church register.
However, they might not have found it on their own. I
have found other useful information on the Mormon
website, as will appear further on in this report. The
reliability of the Mormon data varies widely. The
information contained in their main list, the
International Genealogical Index, presumably comes
entirely from their actual search of original records in
churches and civil registries, which are microfilmed and
then catalogued. These entries may be taken as being the
most reliable. They can be downloaded and taken to Mormon
Family History Centers, where photocopies of the original
records themselves may be ordered. I intend to order
various such documents as time allows. While authenticity
may be assumed, faded writing and the poor physical
condition of some old documents, illegible handwriting
and hard-to-read old-style script may sometimes make them
hard to interpret. The Mormon
website also contains further information from other
sources, including family trees and additional
contributions volunteered by third parties, many of them
amateur genealogists. The quality of this material
fluctuates wildly and is of highly dubious reliability.
One may find a father listed as being born three years
before his son, a mother giving birth in her sixties, a
marriage taking place in 1688 instead of 1588, and other
huge discrepancies and anomalies. There are
many other sources of information to be exploited. The
invention of the internet has not only made available the
vast store of genealogical data on the Mormon website, it
has also opened up millions of other websites for the
discovery of additional information. This includes family
histories, old maps, historical documents (such as the
Ulster muster rolls of 1630 listing the names and number
of men at arms that landowners were required to provide
the King), genealogical associations and discussion
groups, local histories and many other resources. It was
on the website for Glasson and Portlick that I discovered
that fourteen Smyth relatives disputed in the law courts
the ownership of Portlick Castle, which Maggie Gerity
eventually secured for her son Robert and his
descendants. One
fruitful source of information has been Smythe of
Barbavilla, The History of an Anglo-Irish
Family, by Stephen Penny. This very rare book was
kindly loaned to me by Canon Ronald Smythe of Suffolk,
England, who is, I believe, my eighth cousin. (Canon
Smythe is the brother of Pat Smythe, the Olympic
equestrienne, and has written his own autobiography No
Sparrow Falls). Smythe of Barbavilla
traces the history of that branch of the Smythe family
from William Smyth, who settled in Ireland in the early
1600s, to his descendants in the 1970s, a period of about
three and a half centuries. Only 200 copies of this book
were published privately in 1974 (printed by TRUEXpress,
Oxford). The work is based on family letters and
documents, and several family members collaborated in
collecting the records and writing various chapters,
starting in the 1920s. A grandson, Stephen Penny, was
given all the notes, manuscripts and typescripts, and he
produced the final version. Barbavilla is the name of an
estate in County Westmeath purchased by William Smyth
(1692-1769), and named in honor of his wife Barbara
Ingoldsby (who was incidentally the grand-daughter of a
cousin of Oliver Cromwell). The property remained in the
family until 1955 and Smythe of Barbavilla
is an absorbing record of the generations that inhabited
it for more than three centuries. However, most of the
account is extraneous to the family history I have
undertaken here because our ancestry diverged after Ralph
Smyth, the grandfather of Barbavilla’s founder. Smythe
of Barbavilla in fact contains a remarkable
amount of documented information on Ralph Smyth and how
he prospered as the first generation of the family to be
raised in Ireland. It is surprising, in view of this, how
little the book knows of Ralph’s father William, the
settler from Yorkshire who moved to Ireland in the 1630s.
It does not even know that his Christian name was
William, and is reduced to calling him The Settler. This
fact, and many others on the Smyth ancestry in Yorkshire,
were readily available from the entries for other Smyth
families listed in Burke’s Irish genealogical works.
There is a potentially rich trove of information to be
found on the Smyth family at Trent University (in
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada) that I have not fully
explored yet. It is contained in the Jean Sherman and
Elizabeth Sherman collection of documents. These two
ladies collected the letters of their
great-great-grandmother Frances Browne Stewart, who
emigrated to Douro Township, Canada, in 1822, and kept up
a half-century correspondence with her numerous cousins
and other relatives in Ireland, including the Smyths -
450 letters in all from the 1820s to the 1870s. Trent
University sent me a brief guide and description of each
letter in which a member of the Smyth family is
mentioned, and 24 of these appear to refer to persons of
interest to this family history. They offer tantalizing
glimpses into the past. Here, for example, is a reference
to
SMYTH, RALPH
e. son of Ralph Smyth & Hannah M. Staples
b. 1800
d. 1827
m. 1821 Georgiana, dau. of Hon. John Thomas Capel, 2nd
son of Wm. Anne, 4th Earl of Essex
Issue: none
Of Gaybrook
Dies in a drunken fit, 18.7.1827; family afraid Gaybrook
will be left to Capel family; brother Robt. inherits.
Letters, 495, 496, 500
Unfortunately, to inquire further into this drinking
episode that led to the death of Ralph at the age of 27 -
and any other matters of family interest - I would have
to visit Trent University, search the archives for the
transcripts of the original letters 495, 496 and 500, and
xerox whatever is relevant. The librarian, Bernadine
Dodge, tells me this would be a time-consuming task as
the numbering of the letters is rather confusing. She
added that "Frances Stewart's letters were published
as Our Forest Home but were edited
disastrously by her daughter.”
The reference is to “Our Forest Home, being
Extracts from the correspondence of the late Frances
Stewart,” compiled and edited by her
daughter E.S. Dunlop, printed by the Presbyterian
Printing and Publishing Company, Ltd., Toronto, Canada,
1889. It can be read on the internet at http://www.canadiana.org/ECO/mtq?doc=13970.
In this
work Ms. Dunlop appears to have cut out everything that
did not directly apply to the daily life of her
mother’s family as pioneers in Canada. This approach
is indeed “disastrous” with regard to
information about family members in Ireland or elsewhere,
as well as other matters, but is a logical way of telling
a tightly focused family history. As regards the original
correspondence, I intend to do some research at Trent
University some day. (Trent University says that
associated material is located at the Archives of Ontario
and the Metropolitan Reference Library, Toronto, Ontario.
For related records see: 69-1003, 74-1005, 74-1006,
77-1006, 78-008, 92-1002, 94-1001, 94-006, 94-007,
97-023, and 98-005. The page numbers cited in the guide
are only approximate as Trent University Archives has a
different edition of the transcripts (94-006) referred
to). So much for
the documentation and the sources of information on which
this family history is based. All of it allows, in
varying degrees, for a large dose of skepticism. And what
should be kept in mind at all times, of course, is the
waywardness of human behavior. Documents are one thing,
what actually happened may well be something else
altogether. It takes only one extramarital affair, one
rape or one case of spouse-swapping that results in a
pregnancy to wipe out an entire line of male ancestors
and introduce into the picture a wholly different - and
usually unknown - male line of descent. At some point,
over the course of fifteen to thirty generations, such a
disruptive incident, which invalidates everything that
goes before, must at least be considered a possibility.
How it affects the prospects of posthumous Mormon
salvation I do not know. However, recent advances in DNA
science do allow one to establish whether there is an
actual family relationship between people now living and
the bones of their presumptive ancestors. It is just a
matter of digging up the bones of the dead, drawing blood
or saliva from the living, and comparing their DNA. It
was thus that the remains of the murdered Czar Nicholas
II and his family were verified as authentic - one of the
living relatives being Prince Philip of Britain. We
could, I suppose, dig up an ancestor and see how our DNA
compares. Family RecordsThe
earliest date for our branch of the Smyth family that I
have been able to find so far, in other wider Smyth
family ancestries, is in the entry for the Smyth family
of Gaybrook, Mullingar, Westmeath, in Burke’s Irish
Family Records. It begins: Lineage
– This family originally came from Stainton in
Palatinate of Durham but moved to Yorkshire circa 1500,
settling at Rosedale Abbey which was leased to them by
Ralph Neville, First Earl of Westmorland after the
dissolution of the Monasteries. There is
already one mistake here. Ralph Neville, First Earl of
Westmorland, was born in 1364 and died in 1425. So the
reference is presumably to the Fourth Earl. Stainton is a
town just north of Darlington in County Durham, near
Hartlepool on the northeast coast of England. It is only
a few miles away from Stainford, the site of Raby Castle,
built by the Neville family in the Fourteenth century.
The proximity of the Neville’s castle and the
Smyths’ town of origin seems to imply that the
Smyths knew or had some connection with the Nevilles
before they moved from Durham to Yorkshire. Generation
1 William
Smithdike (?-?) = wife unknown (Children: THOMAS, perhaps
others unknown)
Rosedale Abbey was a small priory of the Cistercian Order, founded in the Twelfth Century in the narrow little valley of the River Seven (which is actually a small stream) at the foot of Spaunton Moor, about a day’s ride on horseback northward from the city of York. There is not much left of it now, and it does not seem to have been a very impressive place to begin with.
All that remains, as I found on a visit in 1996, is the
stump of a tower and part of a staircase. Rosedale Abbey
still shows on the map of Yorkshire but it is now the
name of a small village rather than an abbey. The abbey
itself was dissolved in 1538. At the time of its
dissolution it consisted of only eight nuns and a
prioress (who were compensated with state pensions) and
twelve lay workers, mainly farmers and shepherds. But it
did own a considerable amount of land, donated at various
times by prominent local families, including the de
Rosedales, Stutevilles, Wakes, Malcakes, and Bolebecks. At the High
Street shop I purchased “A History of Rosedale,”
a local history written in 1971 by Raymond H. Hayes, MBE,
FSA. According to this work: “On
the dissolution of the priory, on July 9th,
1538 – together with Keldholme Priory – it was
granted to Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland, who leased
it to William Smithdike of the household of the King, at
seven pounds nine shillings per annum for twenty one
years.”
This William Smithdike was apparently the father of
Thomas Smyth, the first ancestor mentioned by name in the
Burke genealogy of the Irish Smyth family. We have no
explanation available for the contraction of the
Smithdike name to Smyth, but according to the Rosedale
history this William Smithdike had some connection with
the court of King Henry VIII, so perhaps further research
of Henry’s reign may dredge up some new information
on the Smithdike ancestry. (Raymond Hayes is dead but his
papers are kept at the Folk Museum in Hutton-le-Hole,
Yorkshire, which is a bit too far for me to visit from
New Jersey, USA, at this time. However, if anyone living
nearby could look through these papers for any further
references to the mysterious Smithdike I would greatly
appreciate the findings. For now, all I can offer on the
subject at this time lies firmly in the realm of
speculation – See Appendix 4 for some absolutely
undocumented conjectures on the possible Smithdike
forebears).
For the present, the fact that the Irish Smyths of
Gaybrook did not know the name of the man who first
leased the property from the Earl of Westmorland
indicates that their knowledge of the period is very
sketchy. Smithdike’s
twenty-one-year lease apparently ran from about 1538 to
1559. The size of the property at that time is not known,
but according to the “History of Rosedale,” some
years later, “when the Manor of Rosedale
was leased in 1576… there were forty farms and six
mills.” We may therefore conclude that William
Smithdike was probably running a rented estate of
considerable size. Generation
2 Thomas
Smyth (1520- ?)= Jane Layton (? - ?) (Children:
THOMAS, others unknown) Burke’s
Irish Family Records continues: THOMAS SMYTH, born 1520, married Jane Layton, of West Layton, and had with other issue, Thomas Smyth. The
dissolution of the monasteries was decreed by Henry VIII
in 1535, when William Smithdike’s son Thomas was
fifteen years old. It would appear from the initial Burke
entry that the Smyth family had moved from Durham to
Yorkshire before that event, in the early 1500s, but the
timing is not very clear. It seems probable that the Earl
of Westmorland leased Rosedale Abbey to Smithdike in the
mid to late 1530s and that the family moved from Durham
to Yorkshire at that time. The
political background to this is that Henry VIII wanted to
divorce Catherine of Aragon because she was unable to
produce a male heir, the Pope would not let him, so Henry
broke with Rome, founded his own church and declared
himself the head of it instead of the Pope. This was the
origin of the Anglican Church. Subsequently Henry
confiscated the property of the Catholic Church, which
owned large tracts of land in England, dissolved the
monasteries and nunneries, and pensioned off the monks
and nuns. Court favorites like the Earl of Westmorland
ended up in possession of a great deal of the confiscated
ecclesiastical property. All this religious upheaval was
going on when Thomas Smyth was growing up, and he was
probably eighteen when his family took over the running
of the Rosedale property. Jane Layton
appears to have come from a prominent local family. West
Layton and East Layton are two small villages northward
of Rosedale Abbey, about nine miles west south west of
Darlington in the North Riding of Yorkshire. The
principal family of this area was the de Laytons, of
Norman descent. It can be traced back to the Twelfth
century and one Odarus, Lord of the Manor of Layton. The
name was later shortened to Layton. Richard Layton, a
younger son of the Laytons, of West Layton, was dean of
York in Henry the 8th's time, and was one of the persons
whose authority Henry made use of in dissolving the
monasteries. He may have been an uncle of Jane Layton.
Having taken over the management of expropriated land and
marrying into such a family, it seems evident that the
Smyths were well in with the new Anglican establishment.
It was a connection that was to continue for several
generations. Generation
3 Thomas
Smyth (1550-?) = Margaret Lightfoot (?-?) (Children:
William, JAMES, others unknown) Burke’s
Irish Family Records continues: THOMAS SMYTH, born 1550, married Margaret Lightfoot, daughter of Simon Lightfoot of West Clayton, and had, with other issue, James Smyth. Thomas
junior was now the third generation Smyth on the Rosedale
estate. He would have been nine years old when the
original Smithdike 21-year lease on the Earl of
Westmorland’s Rosedale property expired in 1559. It
was probably renewed or extended, since the Smyth
connection with Rosedale was apparently maintained until
the departure of his grandson William Smyth for Ireland
around 1630. The History
of Rosedale has this to say on the ownership of
the property: “On
the de-possession of the Earl, owing to his part in the
Pilgrimage of Grace, they (the Earl of
Westmorland’s properties) were forfeit to the
Crown.” It is now obvious that Raymond Hayes, the author of this work, is as prone to errors as Burke. Rosedale Abbey was expropriated from the Cistercian Order and handed over to the Earl of Westmorland in 1538. The Pilgrimage of Grace was a rebellion against King Henry VIII two years earlier, in 1536, by people opposed to Henry’s religious policy and his dissolution of the monasteries. It is obviously impossible for Westmorland to have been deprived in 1536 of property that he was only granted in 1538. And as a beneficiary of the dissolution of the monasteries he would in any case have been an unlikely participant in the Pilgrimage of Grace. According to standard histories of England, the Nevilles were ringleaders in a revolt four decades later, in 1569, against Henry’s daughter Queen Elizabeth I - the so-called rising of the North. In this uprising, Charles Neville, Sixth Earl of Westmorland, a Catholic by birth, joined forces with Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland. They captured Durham but failed in their attempt to free Mary Queen of Scots (Elizabeth’s Catholic rival for the throne) from prison. Westmorland fled abroad. The Protestant Elizabeth deprived him of his titles and all his properties, which included the ancestral seat (Raby Castle), and the Rosedale Abbey estate. A William
Smyth of Nunstainton (whose relationship to us - if
indeed any - is unclear), according to Surtees, was “engaged
in the rebellion of the Northern Earls in 1569, and was
included in the list of attainder.” He
reappears, however, some years afterwards in the
peaceable possession of his own estates. The estates in
question, Eshe and East Herrington, had come to him
through his wife Margaret Eshe, who inherited the
properties due to the lack of a male heir in the Eshe
family. Surtees has a detailed pedigree of this Smythe
family of Eshe and Nun Stainton, in Durham, and of
Acton-Burnell and Langley in Shropshire. To return
to our own line of Smyths, however, when Rosedale Abbey
was forfeit to the Crown it may be presumed that the
Smyths’ lease was renewed by the royal agents, since
the family retained their connection with the estate in
some way into the next century. However, the “History
of Rosedale” states that in 1576 the Manor of
Rosedale was leased to Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick
and his wife Ann. At this time Thomas Smyth senior would
have been fifty-six years old, and his son Thomas junior
twenty six. It is not clear whether the Earl of Warwick
allowed the Smyths to continue managing the Rosedale
property, but he probably did not take a direct interest
in it himself, since he had other, much larger interests. Ambrose
Dudley was the owner of Warwick Castle and Kenilworth
Castle, where he once entertained Queen Elizabeth with a
spectacular fireworks party that burned down one of the
local houses. He was married three times but died
childless in 1589. His title and property then reverted
to the Crown. So, perhaps once again the Smyths were
granted a royal lease on the Rosedale Abbey estate. It is
evident at all events that the Smyth family had good
connections with the establishment, and particularly with
the church, as will be seen from the brief biography of
William Smyth, the eldest son of Thomas Smyth and
Margaret Lightfoot to be found on page 347 of the Durham
Quarter Session Rolls 1471-1625: biographies of
Justices of the Peace SMITH,
William, esq., of Durham, son and heir of Thomas Smith
and Margaret Lightfoot, married Mary Heron of Chipchase;
counsellor at law; of Gray’s Inn; recorder of Durham
city, 1603; bishop’s attorney-general; steward of
Durham, 1623 (Reg. Cath. D., 82n.; Hutchinson i,
490; Surtees IV ii, 20; CJ 199 n.42). Although
Thomas’s son James is our director ancestor,
James’s elder brother William is the key to opening
up some further information on our ancestry. I am
indebted to my cousin Charmaine Robson for a pedigree of
the Smiths of West Herrington, County Durham in which
William alone figures (presumably as the first born) but
our ancestor James does not. Charmaine ascribes this
family tree to The History and Antiquities of the
County Palatine of Durham, London 1816-1840, by
Robert Surtees (1779-1834). According
to this document, William’s father Thomas Smyth, of
Barton, co. Richmond, co. Ebor. (Yorkshire), married
Margaret, daughter of Simon Lightfoot, and sister of
George Lightfoot of Durham, esq. Lord of the Manor of
Greystones and Humbleton, co. Pal. (County Durham). It
would appear therefore that the Lightfoots had
substantial roots in Durham, which perhaps would
partially account for the successful career of
Margaret’s son William in that county. The West
Herrington family tree then lists William as the only
offspring of Thomas Smyth and Margaret Lightfoot,
identifying him as “of the city of Durham, esq.,
Councellor at Law and Clerk of the Chancerie; descended
from Smith of West Layton, co. Ebor. (Yorkshire); buried
in Durham cathedral 7 Dec. 1631, aet. 63.” The West
Herrington family tree then traces the descendants of
William Smith down to the early 1800s. One
interesting point is that William Smith was granted a
coat of arms in 1615 that closely resembles the coats of
arms later adopted by various Smyth families in Ireland,
and was presumably their point of origin. (See the
discussion of Smyth coats of arms at the end of this
family history). Surtees describes William Smith’s
coat of arms as follows: “Argent, on a Bend Azure
three lozenges Or, each marked Erminois inter two
Unicorns’ heads erased Azure. armed and maned Or.
Crest: On a wreath. a dexter Hand embowed or spotted
Erminois, Cuff Argent, grasping a broken sword, proper,
Hilt Or. Granted by Sir Richard St. George to Wm. Smith
of Durham Counsellor at Law, at his Visitation
1615.” Generation
4 James
Smyth (after 1568-?) = Helen Sayers (?-?) (Children:
WILLIAM, at least two other sons) Burke’s
Irish Family Records proceeds: JAMES SMYTH, married Helen, daughter of Francis Sayers, of Worsall, North Allerton, and had issue a third son, William Smyth. James Smyth
was probably born around 1570 (his elder brother
William’s birth year being 1568) and he was a
contemporary of William Shakespeare. He brings us to the
end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign (she died in 1603)
and the beginning of the reign of James I, who united
England and Scotland under one king for the first time. According
to the History of Rosedale James granted
the priories of Rosedale and Keldholme to George
Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who sold them to Charles
Duncombe. They had presumably remained Crown property
until that time. This
transfer of ownership probably affected the Smyth tenancy
of Rosedale, leading ultimately to the emigration of
James’s son William Smyth to northern Ireland around
1630. George Villiers was born in 1592 and was killed in
1628 at the age of thirty six by a disgruntled naval
officer. He arrived at the English court in 1614 and
became a favorite of James I, who gave him the title of
First Duke of Buckingham. By 1620 he was dispensing the
king’s patronage and perhaps doled out Rosedale to
himself. Thus he probably took over Rosedale some time
after 1620. He held the post of Lord High Admiral and was
involved in foreign military expeditions, so he
presumably had no time to manage the Rosedale estate.
Charles Duncombe, who bought it from him, probably did,
and this was perhaps where the Smyth stewardship ended. (See
Appendix 4 for a possible link between the Smyth and
Duncombe families). As regards
the Sayer family, Surtees has some sketchy biographical
details on various Sayers of Worsall and Preston on Tees,
ranging from the parents of John Sayer (born Tuesday
before Epiphany in the first year of Henry IV’s
reign, 1400; baptized at Norton aged six months) to
Leonard Francis Sayer (will dated 1559, proved at York).
However I find no mention there of our ancestress Helen
or her father Francis, so the precise connection remains
in doubt. Generation
5 William
Smyth (1600?-1650)= Ann Hewley (?-1629?) (Children:
James, John, William, RALPH, Margaret {or Marjorie} and
Isobel) Burke’s
Irish Family Records now records: WILLIAM
SMYTH, came to Ireland from Rossdale Abbey circa 1630,
settled first at Dundrum, County Down, but later moved to
Lisburn, County Antrim, married Ann (died ante 1630),
daughter of Sir Thomas Hewley and aunt of Sir John
Hewley, Member of Parliament for Yorkshire, and died
1650, leaving issue… I have
turned up relatively little about the life of William
Smyth beyond what is stated in Burke’s Irish
Family Records. The family history Smythe
of Barbavilla by Stephen Penny contains a
remarkable amount of original, documented information
about his son Ralph Smyth but knows so little about the
father that it is unaware that his Christian name was
William and has to refer to him as The Settler.
Nevertheless, it does have some tit-bits of information.
It cites, as its earliest documentary evidence of him, a
letter written in 1739 by a Miss Jane Smith in
B(allin)derry, who says, “…as yu. Desired I
send yu. Ye Genealogy…as I had it from my
Mothr… She does not remember ye name of her
Gt. Grnd. Father but that he had 3 sons & 2
daughters, John; Wm. & Ralph. & ye daughters
Isabel and Margaret after he had settled his family dyed
at B-macash. He came fm. Near Ross deal abbey in
Yorkshire, where he left one son who enjoyed ye
Estat.” The son who
remained in Yorkshire would be James, who is not
mentioned by name in the letter, and who brings the
number of siblings to six – four brothers and two
sisters. There is no word of William’s wife in this
letter, so presumably she had died before the move to
Ireland. There is no indication of Jane
Smith’s relationship to the family, but William the
Settler’s daughter Isobel lived in Ballinderry, so
perhaps there is a connection there. Smythe
of Barbavilla reports that “The Smyths,
by family tradition, landed at Dundrum, County Down,
before moving to Lisburn. The father died about fifteen
years later at a place now called Old Ballymacash. A
garden was all that remained of the first family home
there.” Smythe
of Barbavilla’s version of the family’s
move to Ireland is sketchy, but is corroborated in some
details by information I obtained elsewhere. It states: Early in
the seventeenth century, Sir Fulke and later Sir Edward
Conway, who became Viscount Conway and Killultagh, were
granted a large estate, the Manor of Killultagh. On this
was built a castellated house and the new town of
Lisnegarvey, now called Lisburn. Settlers were encouraged
to come over from England, Scotland, and Wales, and
amongst these were a family named Smith, or, as it was
usually spelt, Smyth. They arrived in about the year 1630
and quite soon they settled on Lord Conway’s estate,
putting themselves under his protection. Like Thomas
Wentworth, afterwards the Earl of Strafford, the next
Lord Deputy, and Sir George Rawdon, Lord Conway’s
son-in-law, the Smyths were Yorkshiremen. Lisburn was
destroyed in the Irish rebellion of 1641, and Most of
the estate papers which survived this destruction were
burnt in 1707 when the whole town was again destroyed in
an accidental fire. However, an early seventeenth century
plan of Lisburn, preserved in the office of the Marquis
of Hertford, shows the castle and the tenements, and in a
list of the fifty-one tenants occurs the name of William
Smyth. In fact, a
copy of this plan is in my possession, as will be
mentioned below. I made a
search on the Mormon website of all the William Smyths
born in England between 1480 and 1520 to a father named
James Smyth. About twenty came up. Narrowing the search
down to those born in Yorkshire, I concentrated on a
William Smithe, son of James Smithe, who was christened
in Keighley, Yorkshire. January 13, 1600. I believe this
man was perhaps the William Smyth on our family tree
because the date seems about right, and because Keighley
is only about six miles from Hawksworth Hall.
William’s son Ralph married into the Hawksworth
family, and the proximity might explain this
relationship. Unfortunately the name of William’s
mother, which might confirm the identification, is not
given on this birth record. We now turn
to Burke, which records that William Smyth and Ann Hewley
had five children: James, John, William, Ralph and
Isobel. According to Burke, James remained in Yorkshire,
but it appears that the other four went over to Ireland
with their father. Their mother had died by this time. If
their father was born in 1600 they must have been under
ten years of age when he moved to Ireland. According to
Burke, William died in 1650 (probably at the age of 50 if
he was the man born in Keighley in 1600). Why did
William Smyth move to Ireland with his small children
after the death of his wife? I have not yet been able to
find out the reason. The Rosedale lease had probably
expired, but William was only the third son and was
probably not needed to run the estate anyway. He was
evidently well connected in Yorkshire. His father-in-law
was a baronet and through his wife he was related to a
member of Parliament who later became a large landowner
in Yorkshire. So why leave Yorkshire? Particularly as
Ireland was convulsed by civil strife at the time. Ireland had
in fact never been an attractive place to settle. It had
been in almost constant conflict with England for more
than four hundred years, since the first Anglo-Norman
invasion in 1169. In 1177 the Norman lord John de Courcy
invaded Ulster and built Dundrum Castle on the Irish Sea.
Over the centuries, the Normans were never able to subdue
the native Irish, and in times of crisis they fell back
on their two main castles in northern Ireland, Dundrum
and Carrickfergus. Despite centuries of failure by
previous dynasties, the Tudor dynasty tried to assert its
control over the whole island. In 1541 Henry VIII
proclaimed himself king of all Ireland. However, the
native Gaelic earls managed to keep control of most of
Ulster and were in almost constant warfare for the next
sixty years with Henry’s daughter Elizabeth I of
England and her successor, the first Stuart king, James
I. Finally, in 1607 the native Ulster rulers Hugh
O’Neill, Rory O’Donnell and Cuchonnacht Maguire
gave up the struggle and fled to Spain. The so-called
flight of the Earls thus opened the way for James I to
confiscate their lands in the northern counties of
Donegal, Coleraine, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Armagh and Cavan.
James then tried to suppress the rebellious northern
Irish once and for all by undertaking in these counties
the Plantation of Ulster with English and Scottish
settlers, which began in 1609-1610. However,
the colonization did not include the counties of Down and
Antrim, where William Smyth settled, so he was evidently
not a part of the official Ulster Plantation. In County
Down, Scottish settlers were brought over by Hugh
Montgomery, a Scottish laird from Ayrshire, and James
Hamilton, who had begun his career in Ireland as a school
teacher in Dublin in 1587. Their royal grants obligated
them to populate their lands with Scots and Englishmen,
and the first Scottish settlers arrived in 1605. However,
it does not seem very likely that William Smyth, an
Englishman, had any part in these Scottish endeavors. But
there were other smaller settlement ventures in which he
could have been a participant. It is worth
recalling that Ireland was very thinly peopled at this
time. The population of Ulster has been estimated at
50,000 in 1620 and about 100,000 in 1640. The entire
population of Ireland was probably less than a million. Dundrum,
where William Smyth moved to, is a small town and port
picturesquely situated where the mountains of Mourne
sweep down to the Irish Sea. Lisburn, known at that time
as Lisnegarvey, is an inland town further north, about
eight miles south west of Belfast. Dundrum
Castle, built shortly before 1210, was held by the
native Earls of Ulster - from the middle of the
Fourteenth Century by the Magennises of Mourne. The
castle was surrendered in 1601 by Phelim Magennis to Lord
Mountjoy and the English Crown, which granted it in 1605
to Edward Cromwell, Lord of Lecale. (This Cromwell had no
connection with Oliver Cromwell, who came to Ireland
almost half a century later). In 1636 Edward Cromwell
sold the castle to Sir Francis Blundell. The Magennises
retook the castle briefly in 1642, but later lost it to
Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarians, who dismantled
the castle in 1652 when they withdrew their garrison. William
Smyth arrived therefore when the castle was in the hands
of Lord Edward Cromwell, and some connection between them
may possibly be sought there. Perhaps the transfer of the
property from Cromwell to Sir Francis Blundell in 1636
might have had something to do with William Smyth’s
move to Lisburn. The Lisburn
area, as noted in Smythe of Barbavilla, was
settled by Sir Fulke Conway in 1608 with English
and Welsh immigrants from his family estates in the west
of England and Wales. It appears practically certain that
William Smyth was closely involved with the Conway
settlement even if that was not the original reason for
his move to Ireland. Sir Fulke, an English army officer,
obtained from King James I a grant of the manors of
Killultagh and Derryvolgie in south Antrim and north
Down. His land grant extended from west of Belfast down
to the shore of Lough Neagh. Sir Fulke
settled at Lisnagarvey (now known as Lisburn), where in
1622 he built a castle and in 1623 founded the Church of
Saint Thomas. In 1624 he died and his estates passed to
his brother, Sir Edward Conway (later Viscount Killultagh
in the Irish peerage and Viscount Conway in the English
peerage). A fellow-researcher of families in the Lisburn
area, Trevor Fulton, sent me a map of the original town
of Lisnegarvey. It bears no date, but apparently goes
back to about 1632. This map identifies the town plots of
fifty three settlers, and a William Smyth is listed as
occupying lot 29, on the south side of Bridge Street,
which ran down to the bridge over the River Lagan. It
seems probable that this William Smyth was our ancestor.
However, if it was, he did not seem to have any
distinguished position in the community as his plot is
just one in a row of a dozen rather small holdings. All
the inhabitants are listed as “tenants.” The Lisburn
Historical Society Journal comments that this “sketch
map of Lisburn recorded fifty-three tenements, possibly
representing a population of about 260 people. By 1659
the number had grown, 357 people being recorded on the
poll tax for that year. This may represent a population
of about 700. Of these 357 persons, 217 were settlers and
140 were Irish. The town was then the sixth largest in
Ulster after Belfast, Armagh, Coleraine, Derry and
Canickfergus. In 1641 the
natives of Down and Antrim decided that they could no
longer endure any further dispossession by foreign
intruders. Not only the Gaelic Irish but also the
“old English” (settlers in Ireland from
previous centuries) rose in rebellion against the
Anglican and Presbyterian newcomers from England and
Scotland. They drowned, murdered and burned alive several
thousand men, women and children. The rebels attacked
Lisburn and burned the town. The rebellion lasted several
years and was not ended until Oliver Cromwell arrived in
Ireland in 1649 to perpetrate his own massacres of about
2,600 people at Drogheda and another 2,000 at Wexford. So
William Smyth would have experienced all this appalling
civil strife in the last years of his life, almost up to
his death in 1650. Generation
6 Ralph
Smyth (1620?-1689) = Elizabeth (Alice) Hawksworth
(1622?-1689) (Children:
William, THOMAS, Ralph, Robert, Alice, Mary, Margaret)
Burke’s Irish Family Records now has this:
CAPTAIN RALPH SMYTH, of Ballymacash, County Antrim, High
Sheriff 1680, married 1643 Alice, daughter of Sir Richard
Hawksworth, of Hawksworth Hall, Yorkshire, and died (will
dated 15 August 1688, proved 1690), leaving issue, 1
William (Right Reverend), 2 Thomas, of Drumcree, County
Westmeath, 3 Ralph, 4 Robert, 1 Alice, 2 Mary, 3
Margaret. We must now
go back to Burke’s 1899 edition of The Landed
Gentry of Ireland to sort out some discrepancies.
According to this work: RALPH
SMYTH, of Ballymacastle, County Antrim, Captain in the
Army, married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Robert
Hawksworth, Knight, of Hawksworth Hall, County York. Once again
the Smyth of Gaybrook genealogy seems to be at fault
here. Was the name of Ralph Smyth’s wife Alice or
Elizabeth? Or did she use both names? (It is also
possible that unclear handwriting and the free-form
spelling of that time may have variously rendered
contractions such as Elis or Alis. as Alice or
Elizabeth). I have not been able to identify her yet in
the Hawksworth family tree, which is probably incomplete
in the female line. It is possible too that she may have
been a niece of Sir Richard’s, not a daughter. Sir
Richard Hawksworth was born about 1594-96 and died in
1658, according to the Hawksworth family tree. (See
Appendix 2 on the Hawksworth lineage for an extensive
inquiry into the identity of Elizabeth-Alice Hawksworth).
It seems possible that she may have been the daughter of
Peter, another Hawksworth brother, and that both Richard
and Robert were her uncles). “Smythe
of Barbavilla,” the family history written
by Stephen Penny (see the Introduction for a description
of this work) traces one branch of the Smyths from
William Smyth of Rosedale Abbey down to the Smythes of
Barbavilla, Westmeath, in the 1970s. It has this to say
about the marriage of Ralph Smyth and Elizabeth
Hawksworth: “Ralph
Smyth was the third and youngest son who crossed to
Ireland with the First Settler (William Smyth of
Rosedale Abbey, Yorkshire). In spite of much enquiry,
the date and place of his birth remain conjectural. In or
about the year 1637 he married Elizabeth Hawksworth, also
of an ancient Yorkshire family, although it is assumed
that the marriage took place in Ireland, since there is
no mention of her accompanying the family on their
journey. Elizabeth was the sister of Lieutenant, later
Captain, Robert Hawksworth, and a relative of Sir Richard
Hawksworth, of Hawksworth Hall in the West Riding of
Yorkshire. It is possible that Elizabeth was travelling
in Ireland with her brother when she first met Ralph
Smyth. Some of the earliest entries in the Lisburn parish
registers, which have not, unfortunately, been preserved
before 1639, record the burial of two little children of
Ralph Smyth in 1640. There is no mention of the marriage,
but this took place before 1638, since their eldest
surviving child was born in that year. Burke’s
1899 edition of The Landed Gentry of Ireland
thus seems to have confused Elizabeth’s brother
Robert with her father Richard (if indeed he was her
father, since Smythe of Barbavilla says she
was a “relative” of his). As for the
Ballynacastle mentioned by Burke, there is in fact a town
called Ballycastle on the coast at the northern tip of
Antrim, but the 1899 work seems to have confused this
with Ballymacash, perhaps through unclear handwriting.
Ralph Smyth is mentioned by other, independent sources as
being of Ballymacash, and it seems clear that is where he
was from. Ballymacash
is a parish (actually a townland, or subdivision of a
parish) on the northern outskirts of Lisburn. It contains
a historic Ballymacash House, on Glenavy Road, currently
(this was written in 2001) the home of the Drayne family
and the headquarters of Drayne’s Dairy. Up to the
1940s it was the property of the Johnson family, who
inherited the place from their ancestor Ralph Smyth, and
rebuilt it in 1791. Ralph Smyth built the original house
in the late 1600s. His original home seems to have been
burned down or partially destroyed by fire in the
rebellion of 1641. According
to an entry in the Mormon genealogy website, Ralph Smyth
was born in 1620 in Dundrum (probably not too reliable -
some amateur genealogist may have extrapolated this from
the data in Burke’s genealogical works). The date
might be right but Dundrum as his birthplace seems to be
impossible as his mother reportedly died before the
family moved to Ireland. The same entry says he married
Elizabeth Hawksworth about 1642 in Yorkshire. If she was
born in 1622 they would have been 22 and 20 respectively
when they wed. However, according to Stephen Penny’s
Smythe of Barbavilla book cited above, they
were probably married in 1637, and if so their birth
dates were probably around 1615. If they grew up in close
proximity in Keighley and Hawksworth Hall they may have
known each other as children, or perhaps it was a
family-arranged marriage if Ralph was raised in Ireland.
They had seven children who survived childhood, all born
in Lisnegarvey or Lisburn: William (born 1640), Thomas
(1643), Ralph (1645), Alice (1648), Mary (1650), Robert
(1655), and Margaret (1657). The children’s names
come from Burke’s Irish Family Records,
the dates from a somewhat suspect source in the Mormon
genealogical record. Ralph and
Elizabeth appear to have had other children who died in
early childhood, according to other surviving records.
When Lisnagarvey was burned down in the 1641 rebellion
the Church of St. Thomas was destroyed by fire, but both
town and church were subsequently rebuilt, and
miraculously the church records of births, marriages and
deaths survived the flames. The church register for the
years 1637-1646 has been reprinted by the Representative
Church Body Library of Dublin and may be obtained from
the Ulster Historical Foundation. It contains these
entries: Elizabeth,
daughter to Ralph Smyth, baptized the fourteenth daie of
April 1640. Ann,
daughter to Ralph Smyth, buried the seventh daie of
October 1640 Elizabeth,
daughter to Ralph Smyth, buried the xxvi daie of
Jannuarie 1641 These
infant deaths preceded the parents’ imprecise
marriage date reported on the Mormon website, but the
actual church records, and Stephen Penny’s account
would appear to be the more reliable source.
Elizabeth’s birth date appears also to conflict with
the birth date of William, unless they were twins. The death
of infants was a common event in those days, but it was
also a time of terrible strife in Ireland and these
children may have been victims of the violence. Ralph
Smyth would have been a young man in his twenties when
the native Irish rising began in 1641 and Lisburn was
burned by the rebels. As an army officer he would have
been engaged in the years of fighting that followed and
that ended only with Oliver Cromwell’s invasion in
1649, when Ralph was probably in his thirties. The Saint
Thomas church register also contains this entry: Ensigne Thomas Haucksworth buried the twenty ninth daie of Februarie (1640). It seems
likely that Thomas Haucksworth was a brother or cousin of
Elizabeth-Alice Hawksworth, the wife of Ralph Smyth. As
he was an ensign, or standard bearer, Thomas was probably
a young low-ranking military officer and may have died at
the hand of rebels. Ralph
Smyth’s later years after the rebellion seem to have
been a period of success and prosperity, since he was
named High Sheriff of Antrim in 1680 and built himself a
substantial residence at Ballymacash House. The High
Sheriff in those days was the main representative of
central government in the county in relation to the
execution of the law in both civil and criminal courts.
His duties included the selection of Grand Juries and
supervising parliamentary elections. Grand Juries
examined cases to determine whether there was a
“True Bill” – i.e. should the case go to
court at all (“petty juries” actually tried the
cases brought to court). Grand Juries were composed of
some of the leading landowners of the county. So Ralph
Smyth, as High Sheriff, stood near the top of the social
pecking order. How he achieved this status is detailed
below. The
historical background to this and the following
generation: Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth ended and
the Stuart dynasty came back into power with the
restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660,
when Ralph Smyth was around forty. King Charles left the
Irish land seizures largely untouched, but he was
succeeded on the throne by his son James II, a Catholic
who might well have taken measures to undo them. However,
James was deposed in 1688 by William of Orange. In 1689,
trying to regain his throne, James landed with French
troops in Ireland and besieged Derry. He was unable to
take the city, and on July 1, 1690 William of Orange
confronted him at the Battle of the Boyne, near Drogheda.
James was decisively defeated, and the victory ensured
the supremacy of the Protestants in Ireland. The Treaty
of Limerick in 1691 allowed 15,000 Irish soldiers to
emigrate and serve King Louis XIV of France. It also
promised Catholic toleration. We know a
great deal about the life of Ralph Smyth during this
period of upheaval thanks to Smythe of Barbavilla,
the family history written by Stephen Penny. This book
was brought to my attention by my distant kinsman, Canon
Ronald Smythe of Suffolk, England. It is based on a large
number of original letters and documents over a period of
about 350 years going back to Ralph the Tanner.
Curiously, although this work cites original documents
verbatim concerning Ralph’s business transactions it
knows so little about his father William that it does not
even know what his Christian name was, referring to him
simply as Smyth The Settler. To quote
from Smythe of Barbavilla: Ralph
founded a tannery in Lisburn, which is only about eight
miles from the centre of Belfast, lying on the main road
from the south in County Antrim. The tannery was to
flourish and prosper to such an extent that Ralph, as an
old man, held the esteem and respect of the whole county,
and, as an old family document states, “he succeeded
so well as to leave a good estate.” That a tanner
should have been a man of such wealth and repute may seem
curious in these days of synthetic materials, but three
hundred years ago leather was a vital necessity of daily
life. Without his skill and craft, a book could not be
bound, a kitchen could not be fully equipped, a man could
not be properly clad, a horse could not be saddled or
reined; indeed an army could not even put into the field.
Ralph as a young man showed energy and initiative in
taking advantage of the opportunities to prove his skill
in the new settlement at Lisburn. During
the time in which Ralph was establishing and expanding
his business, the country was again in a state of
discontent and insurrection. In 1641 the iron hand of
Strafford was removed from Ireland, by his attainder and
death on orders from Parliament. The Irish decided that
they were a free people once more, and saw an opportunity
of ensuring that Catholicism would not be completely
suppressed by the Presbyterianism and Puritanism of the
Scots and English. Towards the end of that year, a
serious rebellion broke out in the North, and soon spread
to other parts of the country. It is difficult to
estimate the number who were killed in this war of hate,
but about five thousand people, mostly Protestants,
perished by the sword. In
Lisburn, the fighting was particularly intense, resulting
in the newly founded town being burnt to the ground. Many
civilians were killed and Lord Conway’s chapel and
castle were completely destroyed. Ralph Smyth was obliged
to defend himself and try to save his own property from
destruction. It may have been as a result of this local
incident that he acquired the rank of Ensign by which he
was then sometimes addressed. Later he became a
Lieutenant. It is unlikely that he was called upon for
permanent military service, since he was supplying the
very sinews of war from his tannery. Some professions
were “reserved occupations,” and he would be
required to produce the immense quantities of leather
needed for the equipment and armour of the horses and
men. Perhaps Ralph received “temporary call-up”
whenever there was a threat to the security of the
neighborhood of Lisburn, and, as was customary, he
retained the military title until his death. The
rising in the North sparked off many similar actions in
other parts of the country… The rebellion continued
until Oliver Cromwell himself crossed to Ireland in an
attempt to crush it. He brought with him his large,
well-trained Parliamentary army… |