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Hugh
Rogan was born in 1747 in the village of Glentourne, County
Donegal, Ireland. While County Donegal, located in the
northwestern corner of the country, is part of the Republic of
Ireland, its neighboring northern counties are part of Great
Britain. Donegal is a place of great scenic beauty, known
for its poets and musicians. The climate is harsh and in
the 1700s it was an especially isolated and poor region. Hugh Rogan married Ann (also called Nancy) Duffy from Lisduff in County Tyrone. Their first son, Bernard, was born about 1774. Devout Catholics, the Rogans lived under laws that denied them basic freedoms including religion and property ownership. In retaliation, Rogan, like many other Irish Catholics, fought against British oppression in whatever way he could. He was involved with the "Irish Defenders," a group of Catholic agrarian reformers. A primary goal of the Defenders was to change existing laws to allow each family ten acres and relief from tithes paid to the (protestant) Church of Ireland. Fearing arrest and conscription by the British army because of his involvement with the Defenders, Rogan left Ireland in 1775, travelling on one of the last passenger ships to leave Belfast before the Revolutionary War. It would be twenty years before he saw his family or his native country again. |
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| This article is an abstract of research and information that appears in "Hugh Rogan of Counties Donegal and Sumner: Irish Acculturation in Frontier Tennessee," Caneta Skelley Hankins. Tennessee History: The Land, the People, the Culture. Carroll Van West, ed. University of Tennessee Press, 1998. For further information contact the author at the Center for Historic Preservation, Middle Tennessee State University, Box 80, Murfreesboro, Tennessee 37132, phone (615) 898-2947; e-mail < chankins@mtsu.edu>. | ||
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