Only more questions

It seems that there is no connection between the Harper who was granted land in the County of Donegal in 1613 and the Harpers who came over to America in 1718.  Donegal is actually in the Republc of Ireland, just accross the border from Derry County in Northern Ireland.  And the land was given to a Cunningham.  The clans Cunningham and Montgomery had a feud which lasted 213 years.

The story of Hugh Montgomery's grant of land in Ireland involves Hugh and Elis O'Neil, the wife of Con O'Neil, the Irish clan leader who was imprisoned in Carrickfergas Castle on the east coast of Ireland.  Hugh made a deal to spring Con on a jailbreak and get him pardoned by the King in exchange for half his land.  During the negotiations, James Hamilton interfered and each were award one-third of the land.  I don't know when the Cunninghams fit into this story in the Ulster Planation, but they were also given land.

According to a BBC article, the most significant events in early Irish history have been seen as the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the Flight of the Earls in 1607 and the Plantation of Ulster in 1610.  It claims that the Hamilton/Montgomery settlement in 1608 should be included.

I was watching part 4 of Simon Schama's History of Britain (free on YouTube) last night and it appears that feelings of national identity in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland began to develop in the 1200's, especially with the success at conquer by Edward I of England, called Longshanks because of his large frame (exhumation of his body later showed that he was six foot two inches).  Of course, the Highlanders of Scotland did not acquire a national identity at least until much much later.  Their loyalty was still to the clan (kinfolk).  The same holds in Ireland in the 1600's.  The history of the unification of these places into parts of Great Britain is a long and bloody one.  And, of course, Ireland was finally granted freedom in 1937.

Phoebe tells me that in western Ireland there is still great bitterness toward the British, a large part of it because of the potato famine of 1845-48, in which as many as 1.5 million died and many more emigrated elsewhere.   Many of the British of the time saw these people as subhuman.  Paupers in workhouses built many unneccary stone walls which survive to this day.  If you wiki the potato famine, you will find a very disturbing and sad picture.  But that is later in the story of Ireland.  Now I am most interested in finding out information about the Harpers in Ireland before they emigrated to America.  I don't think I will have much success as Rick Harper spent a lot of time working on this.  But it would be interesting to know what life was like on the Ulster Plantation in the early 1700's.  Apparently 40 ships of Scots-Irish left Ireland from 1714-1720.

The only information I have comes from a book my dad gave me on the history of Harpersfield, New York, which says that James Harper, his wife Jennet Lewis, and their five children left because absentee landlords had tripled the rents on their tenant farms and that there was almost unbearable religious intolerance and economic repression for the Scots in Ireland.  They were to reexperience this intolerance when the family moved to Boston two years after they landed at Casco Bay, Maine.