An Irish Beginning...
Hugh Heaney & Martha Peacock
Hugh Heaney was born in Ballymoney, County Antrim, Ireland on 23 February 1852, one of three sons born to Hugh Heaney and Martha Peacock.
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​William Heaney born 22 January 1850, Hugh Heaney born 23 February 1852 and Alexander Heaney born 1854.
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Little is known about the family’s early life in Ireland. Hugh (Senior) and Martha Peacock were married at Rasharkin Roman Catholic Church, Ballymoney, County Antrim on the 30th October 1849.
Martha was born in Ballymoney in 1831 to Alexander and Margaret Peacock.
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Hugh Senior's parents were William Heaney and Alice Johnstone. His death record has never been found, if one exists, however it's widely accepted that he died young.
A Family story alleges that he was involved in Fenian activities and injured in a skirmish with the authorities, but whether is true or not has never been made clear. In any case, Irish families were being decimated by the devastating effects of the Irish Potato Famine and the Heaneys were no different.
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With Hugh Senior dead, Martha married Samuel McCollum in Ballymoney on the 23rd November 1859.
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The first child of this marriage was Letitia McCollum born in Ballymoney in 1861
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On the 1st of August 1863 Martha gave birth to her 4th son Archibald McCollum
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Tragedy again struck Martha in 1866 when she was heavily pregnant with her 6th child. Her husband suddenly died and left her a widow for the second time in her life, aged only 35. Samuel Junior was born 5th July 1866.
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The grieving widow would last little more than a year longer in Ireland before she made the brave decision to transport her family to the promise of better prospects in Glasgow, Scotland.
The Irish Potato Famine
The Great Famine or the Great Hunger, was a period in Ireland between 1845 and 1849 of mass starvation, disease, and emigration.
With the most severely affected areas in the West and South of Ireland, where the Irish language was primarily spoken, the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as An Drochshaol, loosely translated as the "hard times" (or literally, "The Bad Life"). The worst year of the period, that of "Black 47", is known in Irish as Bliain an Drochshaoil.
During the famine, about one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland, causing the island's population to fall by between 20% and 25%. The proximate cause of the famine was a natural event, a potato blight,which infected potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840's, precipitating some 100,000 deaths in total in the worst affected areas and among similar tenant farmers of Europe.
The food crisis influenced much of the unrest in the more widespread European Revolutions of 1848. The event is sometimes referred to as the Irish Potato Famine, mostly outside Ireland.
Glasgow - New Beginnings....
Sometime in the late 1860's Martha and her five sons arrived in Glasgow, leaving her daughter Letitia in Ireland.
It was a far cry from the rural life they had experienced in Ireland.
They set up home in an area called Cathcart, originally part of the Burgh of Govan in Renfrewshire, most of the ancient parish was annexed by the City of Glasgow in 1912. Glasgow was a natural place of settlement for Irish Protestants, particularly Presbyterians, who shared a common ancestry and cultural heritage with Lowland Scots. Skilled in linen hand loom weaving, many came to work in the fiercely independent cotton weaving communities in the villages round Glasgow, such as Calton and Bridgeton.
By 1819 about 30 per cent of the area's weaving population were of Irish origin. Unskilled Irish Catholics came to the west of Scotland from the 1750s in large numbers to undertake the heavy physical work involved in improving farmland. A quickly expanding industrial city needed such laborer's in large numbers and they began to settle in the less favoured parts of Glasgow.
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The Irish were by far the largest group of immigrants to settle in Scotland. With fares from as little as 6d for a deck passage from Ireland to Greenock, emigration to Scotland was a regular feature of Irish life before 1830.
In the 1820s, 6000–8000 Irish per year were making the harvest migration. By the 1840s this had grown to 25,000 over the agricultural season. Most of the emigration, however, was on a temporary basis, peaking during important times in the farming calendar, such as harvest. In the summer of 1841, 57,651 Irish, mainly male labourers, crossed to England and Scotland to work on the harvest.
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There was no attempt to form permanent settlements, although with the development of cotton weaving, the construction of railways and the general expansion of the economy, the foundations of Irish settlement were beginning to be laid in Scotland.
Prior to the great famine of 1846–7, emigration from Ireland could best be described as a trickle. After the famine it became a flood. Because of their poverty and poor state of health, Irish immigrants tended to settle in or around their point of disembarkation, which meant the west coast of Scotland.
Their lowly occupational status and their willingness to work for less than the going rate did not endear Irish Catholics to the Scottish working class. Indeed, their religion was a factor which gave rise to discrimination from all sections of Scottish society.
Since the Reformation, Scotland had been a Protestant country and Catholicism was largely anathema. Attacks on the Irish became commonplace in newspapers, pulpits and on the streets.
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As late as 1923, the Church of Scotland could still publish a pamphlet entitled ‘The Menace of the Irish race to our Scottish Nationality’. The Irish were seen as drunken, idle, uncivilised and undermining the moral fibre of Scottish society. They were also seen as carriers of disease. Typhus, for example, was known as ‘Irish fever’.
•The Heaney’s would spend the next two decades living in Glasgow but frequently returning to visit Ireland.
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•1873 – 5th December – Alexander Heaney married Mary McCurley in Cathcart, Glasgow. Their marriage would be a short one. They had 2 son’s together Francis Heaney (Born 6th September 1874) and Alexander Heaney (Born 26th March 1876). Mary would succumb to Tuberculosis on the 15th August 1876 and die aged only 22 years. A distraught Alexander would return to Ballymoney in Ireland with his young children where he would find love again in the form of his second wife Elizabeth (Lizzie) McQuilkin. They were married at Dunloy Church, Finvoy, Ballymoney on the 9th of November 1877.
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•1885 – 23rd October – Hugh Heaney marries Mary Ann Mulholland at Tradeston Registry Office, Glasgow.
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•1890 – 31st of December - Samuel McCallum marries Phyllis Hunter at Renton, Dunbartonshire. Their life would be touched with tragedy more than once as many of their children failed to reach adulthood. They would have 7 children in total together before Phyllis died of Whooping Cough aged only 33 : Elizabeth McCallum (1891 – 1906, Meningitis) Martha McCallum (1893 – 1893) Phyllis McCallum (1894 – 1894) Samuel McCallum (1896 – 1896, Premature Birth) Samuel McCallum II (1897 – 1965) Catherine McCallum (1899 – 1973) Archibald McCallum (1901 – 1901)
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•1897 – 18th June – Hugh Heaney marries his 2nd wife Mary Callaghan at Renton, Dumbarton.
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•1901 – Martha Heaney McCallum and her 2 sons Archibald and Alexander move from Glasgow to 37 Whitehill Road, Hamilton, Lanarkshire.
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•1903 – 1st May - Samuel McCallum marries his 2nd wife Margaret McPhail at Townhead Street, Hamilton, Lanarkshire. They would have 3 children together Archibald McCallum (1903 - ?) Christina McCallum (1905 – 1996) Margaret McCallum (1906 – 1908, Pneumonia)
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•1909 – 8th of April - Martha Heaney McCallum dies at 47 Whitehill Road, Hamilton. She is buried in the Bent Cemetery in Hamilton.
