THE MONTGOMERY MANUSCRIPTS: (1603-1706) COMPILED FROM FAMILY PAPERS BY WILLIAM MONTGOMERY OF ROSEMOUNT, ESQUIRE; AND EDITED WITH NOTES BY REV. GEORGE HILL.

Genealogy of the Montgomery Family of Ireland.

Published: Belfast, Ireland: James Cleeland and Thomas Dargan, 1869. 

Hardcover. In Very Good to Good-Plus condition considering its age of 156 years . Large format: 9.75 in.x 9.0 in., pp. 472, i-xix (index). Dark maroon textured cloth boards, front board ruled in blind, with beveled edges. Rub-through to several corners. All page edges deckled. Black and red title page. Spine has sun fading, binding remains sturdy and intact. A rare book that will be a treasure and an heirloom to pass down for generations.

 "A striking, though little commented on, feature of late seventeenth-century Ulster society was the writing of family histories. The two best examples of the phenomenon are the histories of the families of Montgomery, written by William Montgomery of Rosemount, Co. Down in the years 1697 to 1704, and of Hamilton, written by William Hamilton in the 1690s. Of these two compilers William Montgomery is of most relevance here. He was born on 27 October 1633, the eldest son of Sir James Stewart of Rosemount.

He spent a good deal of the 1640s in Scotland, a refugee from the war of the early 1640s, and from 1649 in university at Glasgow and Leiden, a refugee from the parliamentary regime... A convinced royalist and loyal member of the Church of Ireland he was active in Restoration politics and was a member of the Irish parliament of 1661-1866.

"After 1688 ill health forced him to retire from political life. He spent his remaining years at Rosemount, apart from a brief period in Scotland in 1689-90 during the Jacobite war, during which that text we now know as The Montgomery Manuscripts was written... selections from which appeared in the columns of the Belfast Newsletter in 1785 and 1786 and were reprinted in the Newsletter in 1822. These extracts were subsequently published in book form together with a preface by William McKnight in 1830. 

Over thirty years later George Hill prepared a new edition and included some fragments omitted from the 1830 edition. Hill’s edition was published in 1869. It was published as a volume of 472 existing pages although it was never completed, because Hill never compiled the appendices that were to occupy the final ten pages." 

Book will be carefully packed and promptly shipped.