Tree Branches

By the middle of the nineteenth century we can at last see the McCorkells of the north-west clearly, thanks mostly to civil registration: non-Catholic marriages from 1845, and all births, marriages and deaths from 1864. Before then we rely on scattered church records and land valuations that list only heads of household. The first complete surviving census is 1901, so the genealogies here start from that census and work back into the early nineteenth century, and in some cases into the eighteenth.

I have stopped at 1901, partly because later generations are easy for families to trace and partly out of respect for the privacy of the living. The branches are in no particular order, but I begin with my own. This is an ongoing page and I will add to it from time to time.

The McCorkells of Ballyrattan

• William McCorkell, Curraghnagarryc. 1750–1827
• Robert McCorkell m. Mary Ann1775–1857
• William McCorkell m. Sara (Nancy) Wray1807–1892
• Robert McCorkell m. Jane Williams1831–1906
• Lewis McCorkell m. Mary Ann McDonald1875–1936

Five generations farmed above Lough Foyle in the parish of Moville Upper, from the cess list of 1792 to the 1901 census and beyond.

Robert McCorkell, 1831–1906

In 1901 Robert McCorkell, a widower, was living with three of his sons on the family farm at Ballyrattan, transcribed in the census as "Ballyrotton". He is my great-great-grandfather. His son Lewis took over the farm on Robert's death in 1906.

Robert married Jane Williams on 2 February 1857 at the new Presbyterian church in Moville, by the Rev. A. Clements; the Londonderry Sentinel announced "Mr. Robert McCorkell, to Miss Jane Williams, Ballyratten". The marriage record names Robert's father as William McCorkell, farmer, of Ballyrattan. The Moville Presbyterian registers record the baptisms of their children: William (1858), Catherine (1860), James (1862), Francis (1865), Joseph (1868), Martha Jane (1871), Robert (1872) and Lewis (1875). Three emigrated in later years, probably following earlier generations of the family. James sailed on the Polynesian in 1886 and settled at Victoria, on Vancouver Island, where he married Jane Freebairn Anderson in 1894 and the census takers spelt the family McCorkall. Francis went to Boston in 1888 and married Isabella McKinnon at Cambridge in 1892. Catherine went to the Boston area too, and on 1 June 1891 she married William G. Dwyer at Cambridge, Massachusetts, the record naming her parents as Robert and Jane.

Jane Williams knew the cost of emigration. In February 1847 her family sailed from Londonderry for Quebec on the Helen Thompson, and the family believed that her parents and four of her brothers and sisters died in the fever that swept the immigrant ships and quarantine camps that year. Jane remained in Ireland, and nothing was heard of the others again.

William McCorkell, 1807–1892

Robert's marriage record names his father as William McCorkell. William was born about 1807; there is no baptism, since the Moville Presbyterian registers only begin in 1833, and his age comes from his civil death record. He died at Ballyrattan on 4 February 1892, aged 85, with his son Robert at his side.

William married Sara, known as Nancy, Wray about 1830. Robert, my great-great-grandfather, was born about 1831, before the Moville Presbyterian registers begin in 1833. The registers then record the baptisms of Margaret (1834), Nancy (1842), Mary (1844), Esther (1845) and Martha (1848), though there were probably more. Four of his daughters emigrated, all settling in Victoria, British Columbia; Margaret, born 1834, was the eldest. A son, James, born in the early 1840s, went to Massachusetts, married Mary Baird at Boston in 1868 and was a labourer at Cambridge, where their children were born. The proof is in a marriage at Victoria on 25 January 1873, when Martha McCorkell married William Harrison: the record names her parents as William and Ann McCorkell, Nancy being the familiar form of Ann. Her sister Esther stayed at home and married Thomas Baird at Moville in 1874. Another daughter, whose name I do not know, died in a tragic accident on the farm:

On Friday last, a girl, nine years of age, daughter to William M'Corkell, of Middletown, Ballyratten, near Moville, was gathering weeds as fodder for a cow. The child placed them in a creel, a custom common in the country, and had secured it by a strap across her shoulders. Having rested her burthen on a ditch, the creel, by some mischance, became overbalanced, and, the cord tightening round the neck of the little girl, she was unfortunately strangled.Northern Whig, July 1845, reprinted in the Ballyshannon Herald, 11 July 1845

Her name is not given, and she is hard to place. A girl of nine in 1845 would have been born about 1836, yet no such baptism appears in the Moville Presbyterian register, and all of William's later daughters are accounted for. Either the newspaper had her age wrong and she was born before the register begins in 1833, or her baptism was simply never recorded.

In Griffith's Valuation of 1857 William M'Corkhill holds lot 23, a house, offices and just over 25 acres, valued at £12 15s, from the landlord Thomas Ferguson. Listed just before him, at lot 22, is the Rev. Andrew Clements, the Moville minister who married William's son Robert to Jane Williams that same year. A second McCorkell holding is listed in the name of Mary M'Corkhill: lot 10c, her share of 68 acres farmed jointly with William M'Cairn and David Campbell, her land and house valued together at £4 15s, under the same landlord, Thomas Ferguson. She was almost certainly William's widowed mother, Mary Ann, who died at Ballyrattan on 18 June 1871. Shared holdings like hers are a late trace of the old rundale system.

Robert McCorkell, 1775–1857

Mary Ann's husband, I believe, was Robert McCorkell, recorded in the Tithe Applotment Book for Moville in 1828. He farmed in partnership with several others in the rundale fashion still common in Ireland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The houses stood together in clachans rather than on the farms: Faltransa, the largest in Ballyrattan, and the smaller Middletown, where the family lived. The curate of Upper Moville, Stewart Marks, described the parish for the Ordnance Survey in the 1830s:

The farms all various in size, but in general all small and scarcely any enclosures at all, as the greatest part of them are occupied in rundale. The method of cultivation is such as might have existed 2 or 3 centuries ago … the cabins at present are generally built in a cluster which is a continued source of contention, from their cattle, fowls etc. trespassing on each other.Ordnance Survey Memoirs, parish of Upper Moville, 1830s

He found the people "poor to a great degree" and "inclined to industry", living on potatoes and, when they fared better, herrings. Within a generation the rundale lands had been divided into separate farms, and by the 1850s there were two McCorkell farms in Ballyrattan: William's, which stayed in the family until the 1980s, and an older holding nearby, where the last McCorkells lived in the 1880s.

William McCorkell of Curraghnagarry, c. 1750–1827

I first suspected Robert's father was another William from the Flax Growers' Bounty list of 1796, where a William McCorkell appears for Moville Upper, the only McCorkell in the parish. The list goes no lower than the parish, so I needed more proof. It came a few years later with a cess list for Moville Upper dated 1792, in which William McCorkell appears in Curraghnagarry, a subdivision of Ballyrattan.

In the same year William served as churchwarden of the parish church of Moville, a position of some responsibility, and he signed the vestry minutes as "William Corkle". In the early 1800s he appears to have paid for his own pew there. That does not mean the family were Anglican. The vestry also handled civil business such as the county cess, and Presbyterians could serve on it; a historian at PRONI confirmed this to me, and all later members of the branch remained Presbyterian.

Before William

Beyond William I am speculating. No McCorkells appear in Ballyrattan before him, but a Robert McCorkell appears on a tithe list for Moville in 1774, in the same vestry book. He lived at Ballymacarthur, about four miles north of William, and was the only McCorkell in the parish. The naming pattern fits. I believe he is either the Robert McCorkell who appears at Ballymacarthur in the 1740 Protestant census, or more probably his son, since the Robert of 1740 must already have been an adult. The McCorkells of Ballymacarthur are probably my direct ancestors, and the name survives there today in McCorkells Road, Bóthar Mhic Thorcaill, near Greencastle (pictured in Chapter I). How and when the family reached Moville is discussed at the end of Chapter II.

This Robert may be the Robert McCorkle who married a Sarah McCorkell at St Columb's Cathedral in 1727; there is only one Robert in the 1740 census, so it seems a reasonable guess. If so, it shows a marriage between two McCorkell branches at an early date.

The McCorkells of Ballymacarthur and Greencastle

In the middle of the nineteenth century Ballymacarthur, near Greencastle, was still full of McCorkells. Griffith's Valuation of 1857 lists Archibald and John McCorkell there, with George at Carrowtransa and William at Balleeghan nearby, and the Moville Presbyterian registers show several families raising children in the townland:

William McCorkell and Betty Smyth later lived at Greencastle. William was born about 1815; the couple are said to have had thirteen children, the youngest being James William McCorkell, born at Greencastle on 21 September 1859. William died there on 18 September 1895.

William of Greencastle and William of Ballyrattan, born in 1807, were near contemporaries living a short distance apart, and both families probably descend from the Robert McCorkell of Ballymacarthur recorded in 1740 and 1774. Whether they were cousins, or closer, is not yet known. William's death in 1895 falls within civil registration, so the death record would give his age and the informant, and the baptisms place his family firmly at Ballymacarthur.

Three Greencastle families

My working tree of the Inishowen McCorkells groups the families around Greencastle into three lines, all probably descended from the Robert McCorkell of Ballymacarthur who is in the census of 1740 and the parish cess of 1774. The links between the generations before 1800 rest on naming patterns and townlands rather than records.

• George McCorkell and Sarah Park, married about 1799. Joseph (c. 1807–1890), who married his cousin Ann and took his family to Glasgow, is their documented son. Two more men were probably his brothers: George (c. 1800–1875), who farmed lot 22 at Carrowtrasna, in the clachan of Faladreen, where the lane up to the house is still called McCorkell's Road; and John (c. 1809–1894), who married Isabella Baird in 1845 and farmed at Ballymacarthur. George married Margaret McLoughlin, and their sons were John (c. 1836), Charles (c. 1845–1885) and George (c. 1849), who went to Brooklyn. Charles married Mary Lynch at Culdaff in 1873, and this branch became Catholic.
• William McCorkell and Sarah Walker. William paid tithe at Ballymacarthur in 1825. Their son William (c. 1815–1895) married Betty Smyth and lived at Balleeghan; their daughter Jane Ann married John Monteith in Ohio about 1870. Another son, Archibald, the gardener, married Sara Anne Burns in 1858, and a daughter, Margaret, married Robert Clark and died at Paisley in 1895.
• John McCorkell and Agnes Hutcheson, married at Moville about 1809. Their son John (1811–1888) married Mary Ann Martin and took the family to Paisley, where they were known as McCorkindale. He died in the Burgh poorhouse there in 1888. His son Archibald married Agnes Douglas at St Finian's, Greencastle, in 1879, and died at Boston in 1883, aged 27.

The Shipping McCorkells

The second branch is the city family behind the McCorkell shipping line, whose beginnings are told in Chapter III. Three generations of the family can be traced in Londonderry, and portraits survive of two of them.

• William McCorkell, innkeeper of the Bogsidec. 1721–1795
• William McCorkell m. Jane Corscaden, 17991772–1836
• Bartholomew McCorkell m. Frances Browne1805–1887

William the founder kept an inn in the Bogside in the 1770s and died there in 1795. His son William took over the Londonderry Journal in 1796 and in 1797 became the first McCorkell freeman of the city. By 1799 he was a grand juror for the city and county of Londonderry. His wife, very probably Jane Corscaden, died at Moville in July 1833 aged 54, and William himself died at his house on the Strand in November 1836, aged 64. Their eldest daughter Margaret died at Castlerock in 1861.

Bartholomew was born in July 1805, the son of William McCorkell and Jane Corscaden, and was educated at Foyle College. He married Frances Browne, daughter of David Browne and Ann Kincaid, on 17 August 1843. He became a justice of the peace for County Donegal and for the city and county of Londonderry, Mayor of Londonderry, and in 1878 High Sheriff of County Londonderry. He died on 6 January 1887.

He and Frances had eight children: David Browne (1845–1897), Jane Augusta, Margaret Fitzgerald, William Foster, Annie Kincaid, Fannie Evelyn, Bartholomew Hubert (1852–1895) and Ada Langley. The Londonderry Sentinel records the birth of a son in October 1845 and of a daughter at the Strand in April 1848, and in December 1865 the death at Strand House of William Foster McCorkell, the second son, aged sixteen. The family later lived at Richmond, renamed Aberfoyle.

By the 1870s the family had become landowners as well as shipowners: Barry McCorkell of Londonderry, said locally to be of the shipping family, owned almost 1,000 acres in County Donegal.

The family album

Photographs of the family and their buildings survive in the collection assembled by a researcher into the McCorkell Line. Arthur McCorkell, Esq., was a solicitor of Shipquay Street and later the Strand. The Sentinel records his children's births in 1846, 1848, 1852 and 1857, the death at Portballintrae in 1849 of his daughter Annie Mary Hay, aged sixteen months, and at Moville in 1860 of his eldest daughter Jane Davida, aged six. His wife Jane died in Shipquay Street in 1857, and Arthur died at the Strand on 12 September 1863.

The city family was larger than one line of descent. Archibald McCorkell, Esq., also a solicitor, of Foyle Street and Glengallagh, died in 1854; a younger Archibald, town councillor, of Shipquay Street and Queen Street, had children born between 1856 and 1868. Thomas Moore McCorkell, Esq., of Baltimore, died in 1845 aged 27 at the house of George Foster on the Strand, "immediately after arriving in this City". Robert McCorkell, who died in 1857 aged 47, was manager of the printing department of the Derry Journal, the paper William the younger had once run. And in 1867 William, eldest son of "the late Captain McCorkell, of this City", died at St Louis.

My tree of the family now places most of them. The founder William married Margaret Gibson, who outlived him until 1807. Besides William the younger, their children included Eliza, who married James McColley; Margaret, who married William Gallagher and lived to 1875; and Archibald (1774–1829), the ship's captain. Captain Archibald married Elizabeth Moore and settled in America, and he is "the late Captain McCorkell" of the 1867 notice. His sons William, born in Cecil County, Maryland, in 1816, who died at St Louis, and Thomas Moore of Baltimore were the two who died far from home; a daughter, Margaret Gibson McCorkell, married William Baldwin Ostrom in New York in 1844. His youngest son, the younger Archibald, was born in New York on 7 November 1820, came back to Derry, became a town councillor and died at 13 Queen Street in 1897. Archibald the solicitor of Foyle Street and Glengallagh (1803–1854) was a son of William the younger and Jane Corscaden; he married Mary Walker at Muff in 1835. Their brother William (c. 1807–1848), of Elagh Hall, married Lucy Caroline Armstrong at Strabane in 1841.

Did the shipping family come from Burt?

The founder's parents are unknown, but naming patterns suggest a link back to the Laggan. Robert McKorkel's son George was baptised at Burt in 1681, and Robert is very probably the "Robert McCorkle, gent." of the Hill of Cullmactraine who left a will in 1691 (Chapter II). If the founder's father was a William born about 1690, he may have been George's younger brother. The chart below sets out this working theory. Only the solid lines are documented.

Some links are now clear. William the younger married Jane Corscaden at St Columb's in 1799, and Arthur the solicitor was baptised at First Derry Presbyterian Church in 1815 as their son, so he was Bartholomew's brother. Arthur married Jane Gilmour at First Derry in 1845. The younger Archibald married Elizabeth Chambers Magee at Warrenpoint in 1855; their sons included Ostrom Moore McCorkell, born in 1867, who emigrated to Philadelphia in 1883, and Charles Alfred, born in 1868. In the next generation Bartholomew's sons David Browne and Bartholomew Herbert married Eveleen Pakenham (1882) and Harriet Hamilton (1894), and Annette Minnie McCorkell married James Corscaden in 1881, renewing the old family tie. Arthur's sons Arthur and Louis both married daughters of the Griffith family in New South Wales, Louis at Broken Hill in 1890, and their children were born at Parkes and Broken Hill.

The full story of the shipping line and its ships will follow in a chapter of its own. Meanwhile, the Wikipedia article on the McCorkell Line gives a good account of the ships, among them the Mohongo and the Minnehaha, the "Green Yacht from Derry", and of the line's end in 1897. Its account of the family's origins repeats the three-brothers story and a birth in 1728 for the founder; the records in this study point instead to a birth about 1721 and a family already long settled in the north-west (see Chapter VII).

The McCorkells of Burt

Burt is where the McCorkell story in Ireland is densest: the Laggan Army muster of 1643 at Elagh, the kirk session baptisms of the 1670s, the 1740 census at Carrownamaddy, Speenoge and Mulleny. Farming families of the name were still there in the nineteenth century, in the townlands of Elaghbeg, Skeog and Dundrain.

An Archibald McCorkle paid hearth money at Elaghbeg in 1663, and an Archibald McCorkell is there again in the tithe of 1837. The same name on the same townland 174 years apart suggests a family that never moved. Lecky noticed the same thing in the Laggan in 1905: families of the old names still living on the old townlands.

Rev. Joseph MacCorkell

Joseph McCorkell (1857–1944) came from this Burt farming family. He was the son of John McCorkell and Mary Ann Fleming, and grandson of John McCorkell (1810–1873), who farmed 108 acres at Skeog in the tithe of 1838. His uncle Samuel (1842–1873) married Mary Jane Hanna, and his aunt Mary Jane (1847–1908) married Daniel Rankin; his own brothers and sisters included Martha Louisa (1866), Samuel James (1869) and Willamina Jane (1871). He entered the Presbyterian ministry and was for many years minister of Moville, where, by a strange twist, he baptised my grandfather in 1909 and my father in 1933, though he was not of our direct line. In later records he spelt his name MacCorkell. He had one daughter and no male descendants, and he is buried at Clar burying ground in Upper Moville, the same graveyard as my great-grandfather.

His photograph, and one of a Mrs McCorkell of Skeog, survive in the collection assembled on the shipping family. Families kept the likenesses of people they counted as kin, and I believe the Shipping McCorkells came originally from Burt. If so, the city merchants and the Burt farmers were cousins, and both lead back to the kirk session McCorkells of the 1670s.

The McCorkells of Loughgilly, County Armagh

Not every Ulster McCorkell descends from the Plantation settlers. This family came directly from Paisley in Renfrewshire in the early nineteenth century, more than two centuries after Andrew and John mustered at Portlough. Whether they shared a paternal ancestor with the Donegal families back in Scotland is not known.

• David McCorkle m. Janet Rogers, Low Church, Paisleym. 1790
• David McCorkle m. Mary Watts, Mountnorris, Co. Armaghb. 1791, m. 1817

David the younger was born in January 1791 and married Mary Watts, herself born in Scotland, at Mountnorris, County Armagh, in January 1817. He was a land steward, overseeing an estate from the townland of Drummilt in the parish of Loughgilly. Mary died between 1858 and 1860, and David some time after November 1860. The family seems to have moved between Scotland and Armagh: their son James Shields was born in Scotland in 1822, and Joseph was born in 1835, either in Paisley or in Armagh, as the records disagree.

The children

Joseph McCorkell of Akron, Iowa, 1835–1909

Joseph followed his brother James to Philadelphia in about September 1853, aged eighteen. In 1854 the brothers moved west to join Robert in Goodhue County, Minnesota, where they were the second settlers in Stanton Township. Joseph declared his intention to become a citizen in 1856 and soon moved to Iowa, leaving his claim to James and Agnes.

A carpenter, contractor and builder by trade, he married Mary Jane Moore at Anamosa, Jones County, Iowa, and they raised seven children in Dallas County: Elliott, Robert, Howard, Joseph, Elizabeth, Walter and Louisa, known as Lutie. In 1884, when a railroad company abandoned its plan to lay track across his land and it returned to the government, Joseph drove a team of horses with his sons Elliott and Robert from near Des Moines to Plymouth County, where each of them homesteaded near Akron. Joseph built a house and stable on the north-east quarter of Section 13, Portland Township, and by 1887 had a 33-foot-square frame house, barn, granary and corncrib, 180 acres broken, 16 horses, 20 cattle and 30 hogs. He died on 18 February 1909 and is buried in Riverside Cemetery, Akron, beside Mary Jane, who died in 1930.

The Londonderry Sentinel, 1829–1869

The Londonderry Sentinel carried family notices from its first issue in 1829. These are all the McCorkell births, marriages and deaths in its first forty years, in date order. Many of the city entries belong to the Shipping McCorkells and their cousins.

Sources

1. Census of Ireland, 1901, National Archives of Ireland (census.nationalarchives.ie).
2. Civil registration, Moville: marriage of Robert McCorkell and Jane Williams, 1857; death of William McCorkell, 1892.
3. Griffith's Valuation, Moville Upper, 1857.
4. Tithe Applotment Books, Moville 1828 and Burt 1837, National Archives of Ireland.
5. Marriage notice of John A. Graham and Mary Jane McCorkell, 1850.
6. Moville parish vestry book: cess list and signatures, 1792; tithe list, 1774.
7. Northern Whig and Ballyshannon Herald, July 1845.
8. Londonderry Sentinel family notices, 1845–1865, transcribed by Len Swindley (cotyroneireland.com).
9. Family history of the descendants of David McCorkle of Paisley and Loughgilly, compiled by American descendants.
10. Burke's Irish Family Records (1976), p. 173, and Burke's Landed Gentry of Ireland, 4th ed. (1958), p. 459, as given on thepeerage.com.
11. McCorkell estate, Landed Estates Database, University of Galway; Return of Owners of Land (1876).