Family:William Irish and Jane Unknown (1)

If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630-1730, Donald Harman Akenson, McGill-Queen’s Press, 1997

Unfortunately Mr Akenson's fact-checker failed to make him aware that this family is from Dorset, England.

Evidence;

1. the family records in the Visitations showing their Dorset and Somerset residence stretches back centuries before 1680 and
2. the records of matriculations of members of this Montserrat family at Oxford University beginning with William Irish c1691-1725 above.

Montserrat is one of the small Leeward Islands tucked nicely into formation along with the other members of the Leeward and Windward archipelago stretching in an arc from Puerto Rico to Venezuela. It was named by Columbus after a monastic town in Spain that the Romans had called Mount Serrat, and which, like Montserrat, featured a serrated landscape.

P 125 - The Reverend Richard Molineaux settled into his charge of life on Montserrat in 1678. Because Molineux is a major name in Irish politics in both the 17th and 20th centuries, one must emphasize that this man was not Irish but English. He was the son of an Established Church parson of Garsington, in the County of Oxford. He was very young (only 21 when he arrived, which was below the canonical age for ordination) and therefore was very malleable and later in his career very quick to recognize his own self-interest. He went along and got along. He married locally, the daughter of William Irish, a medium-sized plantation owner. In 1697 he became a member of the legislative council of the island and in 1699 received a legacy from William Irish of some size; he was able to give up half of his clerical income, splitting it with the Rev James Cruickshank, a junior cleric (who probably did all the work in established tradition). Richard Molineux died in 1721 and was buried at St. Peter’s Church, Montserrat.

P 140 - The French invasion of 1712 was a major disaster for the islanders. An entire squadron of French warships took the island for 12 days of looting and burning. When they left they took between 1200 and 1400 of Montserrat’s African slaves, about 1/3 of the island’s black population. “The enemy overrun great part of the island, burnt our towns, destroyed our houses in the country, sugar works and plantations, carried away sundry of our slaves, killed and tok with them most of our horses, cattle and small stock, broke, burnt and carried with them our household stuff, cloathing, and merchandizes, in so much that they left many of us destitute of the very necessaries of subsistence, food and rainment.” Once more, white settlers of Montserrat were starting over, almost from scratch.

P149 – For the year 1729 Richard B. Sheridan sorted out the 30 leading sugar plantations. In order to make a ranking of the largest plantation owners on Montserrat, lacking in both a religious census and decent parish records, the next thing (the author) to do was to take the 18 certainly Irish names (those of ethnicity) on the list of the 30 largest sugar growers and compare them with all available lists of councils, acting governors, and holders of judicial office because Catholics were totally locked out of governmental posts after 1702. This ranking is by the number of acres planted in sugar cane and finds Irish as #10, Meade as #11, Thomas Lee at #14, Peter Lee at #25, Daly at #22; on the Catholic side James Farrill was ranked #2 and John Farrill at #12.

P152 – The most pleasing career was that of Rev. Mr. Molineux and his descendants. Though not Irish he might as well have been for he and his descendants mined the formerly-Catholic among the Montserrat Irish with the touch of the born diamond merchant. The cleric himself married into the “Irish” family (Irish was both their name and their ethnicity), — see above — the tenth-largest sugar estate in 1729, who themselves were intermarried with the Wykes (of English origin and the largest estate holder on the island). In the next generation the rector’s second son, John, after being educated at Trinity College, Oxford, married the daughter of Edward Buncombe (who before death in 1712, was one of the largest slave holders and the former speaker of the council). On the mother’s side the new Mrs. Molineux was from landed people as well (the Sayers, medium-sized planters) and more importantly, tied into the Trant connection.

The Wyke and Buncombe families were from Somerset - next to Dorset - England and like this Irish family of educated and 'landed' stock.