• Marriage of John and Hannah.

  Date	13 Jul 1827
  Groom	McCORMICK, John
  Address	Ballinderry
  Bride	WALLS, Hanna
  Address	Ballinderry

• John was leasing House and Land from William McIntyre in Ballymaguigan (Re: Ord. Survey Maps 42 & 47, location 101b). Sons Peter leased 101a and William 141a
• A McCormick family was living in Household # 126 in the 1901 Ballymaguigan Census.
• Godparents of John and Honor's Children showed a Sarah McCormick, Thomas McCormick , Isobel McCormick and an Ellen McCormick. Could these have been brothers and sisters to John??
• "... 82 tenants paid their rent directly to the Bell Estate through one William McIntyre. This man had come to Warwick Lodge as a tutor to the Bell children, and on the death of Humphrey Bell in 1825 had married Elizabeth and became master of the property. He actually renewed the deeds and titles on 19th April in the year 1854, 31 years after Humphrey's death, in Conjunction with Elizabeth Bell, his wife. These two held the deeds of the properties until their deaths in 1867 (Elizabeth) and 1878 (William)...."
  (from "Shores of Loagh Traad", p 117)
• Charles McCormick, Householders of Ballymaguigan, 1766 Religious Census, (Shores of Traad, p115)
  John's Grandfather?
• Charles McCormick, tenancy agreement with Henry Humphrey Bell of Warwick House, 1808, (Shores of Traad, p116)
  John's Father?
• James McCormick, rental of "1R, 26A, 26B, 26C", 1854, (Shores of Traad, p123)
  James, son of John, who married Rose Hinfey?
• Susan McCormick, shopowner near Colehill, 1902, (Shores of Traad, p83)
  Granddaughter of John?
• John McCormick, tenant of William McIntire, lot 35a, 1858, (Griffiths Valuation) (see sidebar)
  John or a son?
• Other McCormick / McCormacks in Ballymaguigan in Griffiths:
  John McCormack
  John McCormack
  Peter McCormack
  William McCormack
  William McCormack
  Anne McCormick
  

... My father recovered very slowly from the attack which had brought him so low; and it was plain to all that my mother and my aunt were very anxious on his account. He, however, smiled at their fears, and said that in a little time he would be as strong as ever. The hunting was over now, and he had no temptation in that direction to tax his strength by following the hounds to cover, and exposing himself to all kinds of weather, good or bad, wet or dry. It was now the sweet spring time, and the lambs were playing in the meadows, and the flowers blooming in the hedges, and the green corn springing in the fields. So he amused himself by looking after the home farm, visiting his tenantry, and in doing what he could to teach them a lesson which it seemed impossible for them to lean, the lesson of thrift.

Some of the tenants were prosperous, and had their twelve or twenty acres of land, had comfortable houses, and felt a care for cleanliness and decency of appearance. These were the Protestant part of the population, who were in all respects better off than their Roman Catholic neighbours, better clothed and better housed; why it was so I cannot say, but so it was; perhaps because the latter made earlier marriages, and brought children into the world whom they were hardly able to feed, and could not have fed at all had it not been for the potato. Wretched things many of the cabins were, consisting mostly, of three small rooms, one of which was the living place, with a window stuffed with rags to fill up the broken panes, and a chimney which did not let out the smoke; another of which was the general sleeping-room of the family; and a third, where was often a loom, if the owner of the house were a weaver. The floor was of mud full of hollow ruts, on which with difficulty stood a deal table that had lost one of its legs, the rest of the furniture consisting of two or three low stools, an iron pot, and a gridiron, and sometimes a spinning-wheel placed in the corner of the fire-place. The roof was of thatch, and it not unfrequently let in the sun and the rain. The pig would often join the family party, and add his grunt to the general conversation, while the cocks and the dunghill before the door, where they gained a scratching, would roost on the beam which projected the chimney.

In vain my father endeavoured to induce his tenants to make their cottages more habitable, to shake them out of their indolence, to awaken in them a desire for greater comfort, and arouse them from a state of contented poverty and dirt. They had no notion of the value of time, and when they ought to have been hard at work in ploughing their fields, and cultivating their little piece of garden ground, they would stand about talking, or staring, or yawning, instead of doing with all their might the task which lay before them. "Ned", my father would say to a brawny man some six feet high, without shoes or stockings, with tattered trousers and ragged coat, "Ned, you will never try and get a better cabin than this one! It's a shame that a man so strong as you are, and with a wife and children, shouldn't strive to make a better living for them, and give them a more comfortable house to dwell in."

"Arrah, why, yer honour," Ned would reply, " shure this cabin sarved my father all his life, and lie lived to be an ould man - the heavens be his bed this day!"

"Yes," my father answered, "but that's no reason why you shouldn't try to improve the place, and especially as I have offered to do all I can to help you to make the house more fit for you and the wife to live in, and to keep it clean and tidy. The world would come to a standstill if we were always content to keep things as they are, be they good or bad."

"An' do ye think, sir, I would aiqual meself to live better than me fathers before me? "replied Ned, with a tone of indignation in his voice. "Sorra a bit of me; what plaised thim plaises me, and will to my dying day."

"But surely you might mend that hole in the thatch, and prevent the rain coming in and making all the things about you wet, the floor like mud, and giving you all colds. This must be as unhealthy as it is uncomfortable."

"Shure, yer honour, I have been mayning to mend it every day this last fortnight and I have always put it off and off till tomorrow, for something always intervayned to prevint it, and the weather is so fine now that it can wait till I have time."

"No, said my father decidedly, "that hole must be mended to-day, or I'll not send you the fine cork-red potatoes I promised you for seed for your garden. Now, mark me, you'll lose the cork-reds unless that hole in the thatch be mended before the day's out."

After these emphatic words my father turned away, and I heard him in the evening telling my mother that Ned had sent to the lodge to borrow a ladder might get to the roof of his house and mend the hole in the thatch. ...