McLorinan family burying-ground, Antrim

[Elwyn Soutter]

I visited the Unitarian churchyard in Antrim today. It’s acquired a new name. It’s now the Alexander Irvine Park cemetery. (Alexander Irvine was a local lad made good who became a Minister and writer in the US).

There were no McLorinan graves obvious to me.

As with many graveyards there were plenty of graves with just stumps where a stone had once been, many were illegible and some face down. Plus there’s plenty of land with no gravestones at all. So clearly there’s scope for others to be buried there who no longer have any readable stone.

[jnomad]

Thanks for taking the trouble to look, Elwyn. It's a disappointing result, but it seemed worth a try.

I see that you posted a similar message in your exchange with Peter Mackey on irelandxo.com. There was a Samuel Mackey, born 6 September 1756, who was a brother of Thomas Mackey, born 16 October 1746, the father of Martha McLorinan, wife of Henry McLorinan, my 3xg-grandparents. The age is right for it to be his grave that you found, and maybe other Mackeys are in unmarked and no longer marked graves. That Mackey family also figures on a tree on Ancestry.com called Original Robinsons in Dominica; I haven't tried to fathom the Robinson connection, but the death in Dominica that you found on one of the graves you saw fits.

[Elwyn Soutter]

There’s no shortage of illegible and damaged gravestones so the McLorinans could well be there. There are several with stone setts and fencing around them suggesting wealth, but where nothing legible remains on the gravestones within.

Good to know the Mackey graves are connected to the Robinsons somehow. The set up suggested that. Presumably Colonel Robinson was in the army and died in Dominica. Lots of gravestones here have memorials to folk who died in the strangest parts of the world. Such were the byproducts of colonialism. Two or three spaces or stumps in that Mackey/Robinson plot so who knows who is in there?

[jnomad]

Some follow-up, much later.

I was worrying about Henry McLorinan being described as a farmer at his death but a shop-keeper in the death certificate of his daughter Martha. I've seen the baptism record of his (sixth, according to her death notice in the BNL) daughter Eleanor Charters or Charteris McLorinan (in the C of I church in Antrim town), in which he is definitely described as a grocer. A memoir by a grandson of his, a son of his daughter Mary and her husband John Simpson, says he had a good business at one time at the corner of Main Street and Railway Street opposite the church, but lost the business and the property too; the grandson speculates that he was too easy with his customers.

His funeral service was in the C of I church; maybe he is buried there.

[jnomad]

BNL death announcement says his remains will be removed for interment in Antrim churchyard. I think that must mean the churchyard of the C of I church, since that’s where the funeral service happened.

(For some reason Ancestry doesn’t have the BNL for January 1875. They have all of 1874.)