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John Blackburn, Sr., biographical sketch
Excerpt from the Blackburn And Allied Descendants of John Blckburn, Sr., who came from Ireland to Pennsylvania in 1736
Gibson, Evelyn D.
1978, Lincoln, Nebraska, Arbor Printing Company.
"The question as to when, how and why the Blackburns came to be in Ireland remains unanswered. But history reminds us that in 1611, James I began implanting a Protestant population in Ireland. From the citizenry of the northern counties of England and from the Lowlands of Scotland (primarily of English origin) a picked company of Presbyterian men and women, yeomanry and skilled craftsmen, were transported into Ulster Province in northern Ireland. There they took up estates which had earlier been confiscated from the Irish rebels by the crown of England.
About the middle of the 17th century the confiscation of still more Irish land, under Cromwell's regime, served to increase the migration to Ulster. It is generally believed tht the Blackburns appears in Ireland sometime during the Cromwellian implantation of Ulster, but whether John Blackburn arrived there as one of the settlers, or as one of the Cromwellian army is still undertermined.
That the first John Blackburn was a Quaker by 1667 is evidenced by his refusal to pay a tithe to the church of England, and by the inclusion of this incident in an account of the sufferings of the Quakers of that period.
A soldier's commitments to the violence of warfare obviously do not go hand in hand with peaceable Quaker principles, but we find that in Ulster, some of the Cromwellian soldiers who took up land in Ireland, did join the Quaker movement and henceforth refused to bear arms.
While there seems to be nothing to preclude the possibility that John Blackburn was one of the Cromwellian army, there is an equally good possibility that he was, instead, a farmer or skilled craftsman, and as such could have been among the party of yeoman and craftsmen transported to Ireland. Whatever his status, soldier or settler, the immediate ancestry of John Blackburn stems from the northern English or the Lowland Scots, and is therefore basically English in origin.
There is not definite information as to when John Blackburn became a Quaker. The first settled meetings of the Quakers in Ireland began in 1654 and two years later there were one or two meetings in Ulster Province.
Information from Ireland confirms that there were two Quaker meetings in Co. Armagh at the time the Blackburns are known to have resided there. The earliest of the two was Ballyhagen Meeting, and the other, an offshoot of Ballyhagen, was Richhill Meeting. These two meetings were about six miles apart with the Richhill Meeting being the nearest to Loughgall."
| Owner/Source | Gibson, Evelyn D |
| Linked to | Elizabeth; John Blackburn |
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