Irish to Jamaica

Here's the descent:  James Matthew Rankin, born in Tyrone, County Galway, somehow got to Jamaica.  There he married Rachel Maria and had a number of children, one of which was christened at St Thomas in the East (a C of E church) along with three other children, all registered 16 September, 1827.

One of those children, John Thomas Rankin, foolishly moved to New York, married a Canadian woman, then moved to St. Clair, Michigan (sometime before 1870), where he produced my great-grandfather Samuel James Rankin (1859), my grandfather Frederick James Rankin (1886), and my father Eugene Carleton Rankin (1916).  My family's story is that we were (in part) Scotch-Irish and I always thought that Scotch-Irish mostly lived in what would now be Northern Ireland.

My questions: 
(1) What might someone who professed to being Scotch-Irish be doing that much further south?

(2) How might he have gotten to Jamaica?  As an indentured, or thrown out as a trouble-make?

(3)  I understand that any emigration record would have shown him as departing from England, but are there known records of how the Irish arrived in Jamaica>

ANY clues/pointers/suggestions as to where I might begin to look for andwers or records will be gratefully received.

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Permalink Reply by Gene R Rankin on February 25, 2022 at 2:28pm

Turns out, this is not correct.  John Rankin (1699, Glasgow) married Margaret Tailyefeir (1707, also Glasgow/Lanark) emigrated to Jamaica.  Thereafter: his offspring John Rankin (1742) married Rachel Maria Mckenzie and they begat John Samuel,  and then John Thomas, and were all born in Jamaica.  The last emigrated to the US and is my ancestor.  Clearly we are not Scotch-Irish at all.  Presumably the Scots in Jamaica were overseers of slaves in the sugar plantations.

Permalink Reply by Gene R Rankin on October 29, 2024 at 9:16pm

Even more discovered:  not only were we in Jamaica for four generations, but we also owned slaves.  This is documented by an 1826 inventory (8 years before slaves were freed).  Samuel Rankin ('our' John Samuel, at age 57?) owned 4 slaves (3 men, 1 woman), all in the same parish of Jamaica where the other Rankins were born & christened. .  Presumably this was prefatory to the government paying off slaveholders when slavery was forbidden in the Commonwealth.

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