Early American Dalzells and Delzells

(Note: The following quotation is taken from “The Scot In Ulster” by John Harrison, London 1888, It provides a wonderful sense of the early Scottish emigrants from Scotland to Northern Ireland, and of our ancestors. The photographs were taken by Bob Delzell on a recent trip to Northern Ireland.  The photo of the Scottish cottage and two Dalzells is on a Dalzell farm in County Down and dates back some three hundred years.  The tin roof was only recently added when it became difficult to find a thatcher.)

“Chapter II, The Scot Settles North Down and County Antrim.

Two miles south from Donaghadee, on the shore road into the Upper Ards, that narrow peninsula between Strangford Lough and the Irish Sea, there lies a little enclosure which must arrest the stranger’s attention. It is a graveyard, and is called Templepatrick. It is surrounded by low stone walls; no church or temple is now within the confines; no trees or flowers give grateful shade, or lend colour and tender interest; it is thickly covered with green mounds, and with monumental slabs of grey slaty stone,—the graves are packed close together. Read the simple “headstones,” and you discover no trace of sentiment; few fond loving words; no request for prayers of the passer-by for the souls of those who sleep below; nothing more akin to sentiment than “Sacred to the memory of.” Above, great masses of grey clouds, as they go scudding past, throw down on the traveler, as he rests and thinks, big drops of rain; and before him is spread out north, south and east, the sullen sea, whose moan fills al his sense of hearing. It is not the spot which,a man would love to picture himself as his last resting place. Read the names on the stones, and you discover why here is Ireland there is to be found nothing of tender grace to mark the higher side, nothing of tinsel to show the lower, of Irish character. The names are very Scottish— such as Andrew Byers, John Shaw, Thomas M’Millan, Robert Angus; it is a burying place of the simple peasants of County Down, who are still in the end of the nineteenth century, as Scottish as they were when they landed here, nearly three centuries ago.”