Estate Records

Estate records,  which include maps, rentals, letters, etc., are a useful source for both the local and family historian. However, they are not available for every area in the province. The Ballymoney area lies within the lands originally granted to the Earl of Antrim. Due to growing debts, during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Antrim family sold off parts of their estate. The result was smaller individual landlords owning varying numbers of townlands, not always contiguous, scattered throughout the entire North Antrim area. Some such as Leslie, Montgomery and McNaughton had big houses with demenses. Others had less grand houses and some were not even resident in the area.

The map in the table below will show the townlands within the parishes of Ballymoney and Kilraghts held by the Earl of Antrim in 1859 and those held by the Agnew, Batt, Cromie, Hutchinson, Leslie, and Montgomery estates. The blank townlands on the map were owned by a variety of other people.

Three of these estates, Agnew, Hutchinson and Montgomery have books of estate maps which show the extent and layout of the holdings plus the names of the tenants and the acreages that they rented. The acreages were in Cunningham acres - a Scottish measure. Cunningham acres need to be multiplied by 1.29 to convert them to English, statute acres. The Agnew and Montgomery maps were produced by James Williamson in 1788 and the Hutchinson maps by James Kane in 1805.

The townlands covered in each estate are listed in the tables below. They are arranged in geographical groups. You might want to compare the list of tenants in these maps with the list of tenants in the Griffith's Printed Valuation of 1859. In a few instances there is a Griffith's Valuation Map to accompany the 1859 list - see below.

1859 Griffith's Valuation Maps to accompany the Griffith's List

There are some other maps relating to these estates which I have not used here. The actual books of maps can be seen in PRONI, Belfast - Agnew (T/2309) Hutchinson (D/408) and Montgomery (T/1638/2). My thanks to PRONI for permission to use these maps and special thanks to Ian Montgomery of PRONI, who knows more about the Antrim estate than I ever will.