I've just read this thread for the first time. I just have to comment. This is a quote from an earlier post from someone on the subject: <<The change to the Irish custom of leaving land to the eldest son, which was disallowed in the Penal Laws, was forced on the Irish under the belief that within three generations no Irish Catholic would have enough land on which to grow enough food to sustain a family and thereby provide an end of all these troublesome Irishmen. How Christian is that?>> Leaving the property to the eldest son, through the custom of primogeniture, was introduced into Ireland from England. This was a custom. It didn't prevent an individual from making personal choices as to the disposal of his property. He could leave it to any of his children if he so wished. The tradition in Ireland before this was a form of gavelkind, by which land was divided between all the sons. During the Penal Laws gavelkind was imposed on Roman Catholics of property (not poor people) in a successful attempt to reduce Catholic ownership of land. After the Penal Laws had been dismantled the custom of gavelkind was very often pursued by Catholic tenant farmers (under no obligation from anyone) in a long period of rising population. It was this that led to large scale subdivision and contributed in no small way to over dependence on the potato. As for new laws in the post-Revolutionary USA, I can't comment except to say that if its citizens were living under English laws before the Revolution they already had the right to leave property to any of their children. Attributing blame to people in the past cannot be done with any great precision. Hindsight is not something they benefited from, nor did they experience subsequent historical developments that might have enlightened their thought process. We cannot judge people from the past by standards of today. People (and whole populations) were often guided or misguided by narrow ideologies and fear of others. I don't believe that we are properly equipped to condemn any set of people from the past. I believe that in general they were doing what they thought was right. We, on the other hand, have the benefit of hindsight, knowledge of subsequent developments and in most cases an enlightened educational system. We should be slow to judge. Remember, hopefully there are generations to come, and they will wonder what made people of the first decade of the twenty-first century support narrow ideologies and inflict misery and distruction on their fellow man. Life's not that simple, is it? Paul Gorry Baltinglass Original Message: ----------------- From: Barbara Dowling [email protected] Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:40:47 -0500 To: [email protected] Subject: [IRL-WICKLOW] Land to eldest son Hello all, Just a reminder that c.1783,right after the Rev.War, the English law was changed in the new U.S. so that all children had the right to inherit equally from their parents.Of course this included real property as well as personal property. This has worked out very well in the U.S. as everyone knows. Barbara -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web LIVE – Free email based on Microsoft® Exchange technology - http://link.mail2web.com/LIVE