Lurgan, Ireland

Lurgan is the oldest Quaker meeting in Ireland. Hodgsons subscribed to the construction of this meetinghouse in 1696 to accommodate their growing community.

1658 Lynastown Friends burial ground in Ireland likely contains some of my ancestors, buried in unmarked graves as was the Quaker custom.

 

 

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Generation four: the Irish Connection

For now, any consideration of Orphan George Hodgson’s roots coming from Cumbria and then Ireland remain conjectural, based largely on Jeremiah Mills’ undated and all-too-brief notes from the early 1800s recounting the Hodgson family’s disastrous passage to the New World from Ireland or northwest England. Even so, this is what I have.

Central to the argument are the surviving records of Lurgan Friends Meeting. Arising from the traveling ministry of William Edmondson in 1654, Lurgan Monthly Meeting in Armagh is the oldest Quaker institution in Ireland.

The Lurgan picture becomes complicated, first, by the badly faded ink on many of the minutes recording Quaker families, second, by gaps in the records themselves, and, third, by the existence of a cluster of Hodgsons as part of the Lurgan Friends community. In addition, the first surviving page of the Lurgan minutes begins in 1675, two decades after the Meeting’s founding.

Nor can all of the gaps in the Lurgan minutes be blamed on faded ink or missing pages. In 1691 the men’s meeting noted “the Booke of record of Certificates of Marriages, Birthes & Burialls belonging to this meeting having for some years past been entrusted to ye care of John Dobb, & he now being absent & not in this nation … ye said Booke hath not been duely kept as formerly.”

But, as Chris Dickinson confirmed in a e-mail, “You are absolutely right that the Hodgsons of Lurgan came from Murton in Lamplugh in Cumberland.”

Old Swede’s

The known trail for George Hodgson starts in the parish records here, when he wed Mary Thatcher. They were eloping, and violating Quaker discipline.

The church, now Episcopal, is older than the surrounding city of Wilmington, Delaware.

From the side.