Hugh's quarter

The White farm at Carrowhugh, 1857 to 1911, from the valuation, the census and the graveyard.

Carrowhugh is the English spelling of the Irish Ceathrú Aodha, "Hugh's quarter," a townland on the Lough Foyle shore in the parish of Moville Lower, two miles north of Moville on the road to Greencastle. The Morrison records spell it Carrichue. It is small: about 38 houses and 190 people in 1901.

1857: the valuation

Griffith's Valuation, the survey that set the tax on every holding in Ireland, lists a John White and a John Morrisson among the 37 occupiers of Carrowhugh in 1857. Record The neighbors' names that year (Gillespie, Cavanagh, McDermott, McGuinness, Campbell, Douglass, Doherty) are the same families the census finds there again in 1901 and 1911. John White is probably James White's father. Open question See the research note on James White's parents.

1859 to 1879: eleven children

James White and Mary Burnside married around 1858. Their children were born at Carrowhugh over twenty years: John in 1859, Rose in 1861, Rebecca Jane, Robert, William Thomas, Mary, Bernard, Matilda, Margaret, James, and Albert in 1879. James died on the farm on August 8, 1898, aged about 60.

1901: the census

The census taker came on March 31, 1901. Record

House 27, Carrowhugh: Mary White, 61, widow and head of the household, Church of Ireland; her sons Robert (30), James (22) and Albert (19), all farmers; her daughter Matilda (24), a dressmaker. Everyone in the house could read and write.
The building return describes a stone house with a slate roof, five or six rooms and three windows across the front, graded a "second-class house," with nine outbuildings on the holding. Mary was the landholder in her own name.
Most of her neighbors lived in thatched houses of two to four rooms with one to four outbuildings. The White farm was one of the largest in the townland.

1911: the Whytes

Ten years later the family is still there, spelled Whyte by a different enumerator: Mary, 73, and her son Robert, 44, single, farming, with a 16-year-old servant, Michael Barr. Record James, Albert and Matilda had gone.

The graves

James White (died 1898) and Mary Burnside White (died March 28, 1914) are buried at St Finian's, the Church of Ireland graveyard at Greencastle, a few minutes up the road from the farm. Record A Robert White who died in 1956 is buried there too, very likely the son who stayed with his mother and kept the farm. That conflicts with the tree, which has Robert dying in the Bronx in 1967. Open question

Church of Ireland, not Catholic

Both censuses list the Whites as Church of Ireland, and so were the Carrowhugh Morrisons next door. They were Protestant tenant farmers in a mostly Catholic parish, and they had been on the same land for at least 54 years, from 1857 to 1911. The family story of a Moville shop that was boycotted is on the research page. So far no record supports it.