Ballymoney Home Page

The main aim here is to provide you with a range of sources relating to the town of Ballymoney and the surrounding district situated in the northern part of County Antrim, Northern Ireland. The sources will provide evidence of who lived there at various times from the the early 1800s to the 1950s, where they lived, the sorts of houses they lived in, what they did for a living and what the place was like, particularly in the nineteenth century. Unlike a book, the sources do not provide a continuous "story" of  people and life in the area from 1800 to 1950. Instead, each source opens a particular  "window" into the past at a specific time. You will have to construct your own "story" from the sources. Your starting point could be the 1950s or the 1800s. I tend to begin with the 1859 Griffith's Printed Valuation to see if I can recognise any of the names listed, and then move out from there.

The site contains four sections which you will find in the menus in the left and right margins of the main pages in the site.

• The section, ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISIONS in the top half of the left-hand menu, will locate the area, particularly for visitors from abroad, and introduce you to the territorial and administrative divisions which existed in the Ballymoney area during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. You may need to refer to the maps when studying the sources in the next two sections. These relate to the town of Ballymoney and the surrounding countryside, and are the key sections in the site.
   
• The section, BALLYMONEY TOWN, in the bottom half of the left-hand menu, includes material  ranging from photographs and maps to a number of tables containing details of persons who lived in the town at various times from the early 1800s to the 1950s. The degree of detail in these tables varies from simply a list of trades and professions in the Street Directories to the 1901 Census Returns which provide quite detailed information on families and individuals. At the moment the 1901 Returns are only available for Church Street and High Street. In the case of the 1859 Griffith's Valuation I have scanned in the pages from the Printed Valuation Book which cover all of the streets in the town of Ballymoney plus copies of the large-scale valuation maps which accompany the Griffith's Valuation.

• The section, BALLYMONEY RURAL AREAS, in the top half of the right-hand menu, include similar records to those for the town. Note that the records for 1803, 1859, 1905 and 1952 will allow you to trace names and townlands throughout an area covered by the nineteenth century parishes of Ballymoney and Kilraghts. Also, I have put up more detailed information relating to three areas within these parishes. This includes Valuation Records and the 1901 Census Enumerators' Returns.
   
• The section ADDITIONAL SOURCES, in the bottom-half of the right-hand menu, provides links to a variety of other sources. The link, Estate Records, will take you to maps and lists of tenants in townlands which were part of the Hutchinson, Agnew and Montgomery estates around Stranocum, Dunaghy and Kilraghts. The link, General Social and Economic Sources, will take you to extracts from documents which will give you a flavour of life in the Ballymoney district from the late eighteenth century to the early 1900s. The other three sources are crucial to anyone pursuing their family tree and will provide links to  the main repositories which hold these records.

Since most of the tables on this site list the names of people and the townlands in which they lived, they complement the online databases which can be accessed through the Ballymoney Ancestry site.

Usually there are two versions of a table available. One where the information has been sorted primarily by surname and one where the primary sort is by townland or street. This means that you can look through the tables sequentially from 1803 to 1952 for either particular surnames or for a particular townland or street and note the changes.

Most of the records on this web site have been sourced from the Public Record Office (PRONI) and are reproduced with the kind permission of the Deputy Keeper of Records, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. I would also like to thank the staff of PRONI, both past and present, for their generous help over the years. Many thanks also to the staff at the Local History Library in Ballymena. The photographs of Ballymoney Town were generously supplied by Keith Beattie of the Ballymoney Museum and Mac Pollock, and are reproduced with their kind permission.