From Ballyboyle to Corglass... a Boyle family's story
Part 1 - Ballyboyle - our ancient ancestors
Religious affiliation - Irish or Scottish Boyles?
By the time of the 1911 census, County Antrim (which includes a large part of the city of Belfast) had the largest concentration of Boyles outside of Donegal, and there were also significant numbers in counties Down and Londonderry.
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For most of Ireland, (until the late 20th century) it was a near certainty that Boyle/O’Boyle = native Irish = Catholic, and no more so than in Donegal where 99.7% of them described themselves as such in the 1911 census. And with the exception of one small family in Antrim who were Unitarian, every O’Boyle in Ulster was Catholic.
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However, there are sizeable Protestant Boyle minorities in three counties – Down has 32.7%, Antrim has 27.4% and Londonderry has nearly 20%. Are these Boyles also of Donegal descent, or are there other possibilities?
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Religion is by no means a perfect guide to family origins; conversions did occur (in both direction) and ‘mixed’ marriages were more common in the past than is sometimes realised, with some children being brought up Catholic and others Protestant. Nevertheless, the combination of geography and religion strongly suggests that nearly 10% of the Boyles in Ulster were not of native Irish descent.
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Antrim and Down are close to Scotland, and the connections between them have always been strong. There has been continuous movement of people, goods and ideas across the North Channel for centuries.
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Furthermore, through a pure coincidence of language, the Boyle surname is also prominent in Lowland Scotland. An Anglo-Norman family with origins in the Normandy town now known as Beauville were granted lands in the south-west of Scotland, eventually receiving the title of Earls of Glasgow. Their name, de Boivil or de Boyville was anglicised to Boyle, just as the Irish Ó Baoighill became Boyle. But since there is no link between de Boyville and Ó Baoighill, it is just a coincidence that the two families share the same name.
Nevertheless, the name spread in Ayrshire and Galloway, areas from which people came to settle in Antrim and Down, the vast majority of whom were Protestant. It seems plausible that most Protestant Boyles are descendants of these Scottish settlers. Within this community, the names Bell and Bole are also common, and these could all be variants of the same original name.
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It has already been noted that some Boyles relocated from Donegal to the territory of the Earl of Antrim following the dispossessions of the mid 1600s. The Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Islands of Scotland shared a common culture and language with the north of Ireland. The MacDonnells, Earls of Antrim were part of the Scottish Clan Donald,. It is beyond the scope of this study to investigate whether Boyles from Ireland became established in medieval Gaelic Scotland, or if the name emerged there independently, but the Clan Donald Foundation acknowledges Boyle as a family with links to Clan Donald.
Elsewhere, there were small pockets of Boyles who were protestant, but it is difficult to tell just from census records from where they originated. Kerry, for example, has few Boyles - only 216 out of a population of nearly 160,000 yet 55 (25%) of them were Protestant. Most of these were members of half a dozen farming families in the Castleisland area who seem to have been established there for many decades at least - they are also recorded in Griffiths' Valuation. . Even the oldest members of this community were born in Kerry, and so they were not recent arrivals, and though some were substantial farmers, there are no indications in the census records that they were well-off members of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Those who were not farmers had fairly ordinary occupations - seamstress, shop assistant, publican and accountant, for example.
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Their Protestantism, and distance from Donegal, might suggest an English origin, but this is far from conclusive without additional information.
Religious affiliation of Boyles /O’Boyles in the 1911 Census for counties of Ulster.