On Wednesday 18 November Oliver Whelan delivered a CHAS lecture based on his recent book ‘Landholding in the new English settlement of Hacketstown, Co. Carlow, 1635–1875’.
The talk told the story of the new settlement of English Protestants which was established in Hacketstown in the early seventeenth century. It described how the settlement endured the trauma of the rebellion of 1641 and how its mixed population of Protestants and Catholics emerged from the penal laws of the eighteenth century. It outlined how the security of tenant farmers on their holdings gradually improved during the nineteenth century and concluded with the land purchase legislation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which enabled many of the tenants to acquire full ownership of their lands.
Oliver Whelan, a native of Hacketstown, is a retired director of the National Treasury Management Agency. He is currently researching the Land War and its aftermath in Co. Carlow for a PhD in Maynooth University.
To view Olivers talks please click here
Hi, I am working with a group from Hacketstown, Co Carlow on creating a website for the town http://www.lovehacketstown.ie (to be launched before Christmas). We have very little information about the history of the town and came across Oliver Whelan lecture on your website. Would it be possible to put us in touch with Oliver and could we use some of the text on the lecture on our History of Hacketstown page and then link to your site for viewers to read the rest.
I have just listened to Oliver Whelan’s hugely informative talk on the landholdings of Hacketstown. I am a descendant of John Jones [1731-1803] of Woodside and have spent many long hours trying to decipher and collate local land lease deeds for his wife’s family, the Barkers. Oliver’s clear explanation of the history of the actual land owners is vey helpful in this respect. Would it be possible for you to ask Oliver if he has any information on Jones and Barker tenants and whether he would be kind enough to correspond with me on the history of the Jones family in the area? It was my great uncle, Richard Arthur Jones, who died at Ypres in 1915 that inspired me to take up family history and I am keen to understand how the family came to be in Hacketstown.
Many Thanks
Ruth Mathewson