Jack Stewart, Jamie Boyd… and Friends

Subscribers to Ulster-Scots poetry 1793-1824: a name survey

It was a common practice in the late 1700s and early 1800s for authors, especially those without enough capital to pay the printers or unable to gauge demand, to collect money (or at least a promise to buy) in advance from prospective purchasers. In return, the list of those who had subscribed was often printed in the book. In Ulster, such lists survive in eleven little books of poetry published by country rhymers, all containing some Ulster Scots, ranging from, at one end of Ulster, Hugh Porter of Moneyslane and Andrew M‘Kenzie of Dunover, in County Down, to David Colhoun, ‘The Shepherd of Mary Grey’, in County Tyrone. All eleven were published between 1793 and 1824. Between them the books contain a total of nearly 7,000 names, and from them can be extracted the most common surnames and forenames in the Ulster Scot areas of Ulster at this time.

As might be expected, there was a vast array of surnames, but the most common, with more than fifty occurrences each, are listed below.

Those with more than thirty occurrences are

There were a large number of names with more than twenty occurrences. These are listed in alphabetical order below.

As far as forenames went, there was a much smaller variety, and a large proportion of the population bore a relatively small number of names: for instance, nearly one male in lour was called John. The top seventeen, that is all forenames to score higher than 1% of the total, are listed below. The total number of forenames is less than the 7,000 surnames recovered, as many were listed by initials only.

A much fewer number of female forenames was recovered, as most of the over 700 women listed were known simply as Miss or Mrs. Just over a hundred female names occurred, and the list of those scoring higher than 1% is

Much more work needs to be done on these names. For instance, they are almost invariably located in a townland or town, and even a preliminary examination reveals that the readership of these volumes closely corresponds with the Ulster-Scots speaking areas of Antrim, Down, and the Foyle basin. It is quite possible that this list of subscribers will prove to be the nearest obtainable to a past census of Ulster-Scots.

Ronnie Adams