Irish vs. Scots-Irish

There is a huge difference between the real Irish and the Scotch-Irish. And that's pronounced "scawtch," and not Scots, because there's also a difference between the real Scots and the Scotch-Irish. As far as I know none of my ancestors called themselves Scots, or Irish (except for the Teagues, who really were Irish). They called themselves Scotch-Irish.

The project already exists, it's called Ulster Scots People, because that's the politically correct term they prefer in Scotland.

Us Scotch Irish maintained a careful distinction between "us" and the real Scots (the real Scots came early to New England, for instance, as Cromwell's Prisoners of War). The real Scots were Gaelic speakers, often (but not always) from the Highlands, tartan wearers, etc.

The Scotch Irish were ethnically as likely to have been of French or Border English background as from the Lowlands; they were all "made welcome" on the Ulster Plantation. Not tartan wears, not Gaelic speakers, came much later to the US, and to the South much more. Also the religious affiliations would have been different; Scots would be Presbyterian mostly, but I don't think that was necessarily the case in the Ulster.

Anyway, Ulster Scots people would be the jumping off point. Before they went to the Ulster they would have been mostly from Ayrshire.

https://www.geni.com/projects/Ulster-Scots-people/8806

Besides Scotch-Irish, the other term I heard, growing up, was "from Northern Ireland." The Ulster Plantation was not so meaningful, but "everyone knew" that from Northern Ireland meant they were not Catholic.

I haven't got much to add to this discussion but interesting that you refer to Scotch pronounced Scawtch.... The Scots do NOT like to be called Scotch.... it's a drink they say not a nationality.

Erica's love for the term "Scotch-Irish" is certainly not shared by all; the term is a controversial one. But at this point, I have no desire to get into a semantics debate.

I am aware of the Ulster Scots project, but it doesn't help us here since it's not specifically for American descendants, which is what we're talking about. Do we need/want a *separate* project for Ulster Scots in the U.S., in line with our other ethnic projects? Do we want to remove Ulster Scots and their descendants from our Irish American projects? In ambiguous cases, where would we want to put profiles? Etc.

Terry - I direct you to Martin Amis about it. The term Scotch-Irish is an Americanism, it is not a Scottish term, and has in fact little to do with Scotland, or direct descent from Scotland, as the people who went from Scotland to Northern Ireland to America were a distinct grouping. Andrew Carnegie was Scots, Andrew Jackson was Scotch-Irish.

I would be curious to know how these groups who came to Canada and Australia and New Zealand referred to themselves in the 18th and 19th century.

I do think it important that President Jackson not be in the same ethnic category as President Kennedy, it is misleading. I wouldn't call them Ulster Scots in America, though, too many of us are not aware of the Ulster Plantation, or when you look as genealogy, it's from the specific county in Ireland.

You can call the new project Scots-Irish Americans if you like.

Always good to be in sync with Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-Irish_Americans

Scotch-Irish (or Scots-Irish) Americans are American descendants of Presbyterian and other Ulster Protestant Dissenters from various parts of Ireland, but usually from the province of Ulster, who migrated to North America during the 18th and 19th centuries ....

OK, the great historian of this movement of people's is David Hackett Fisher, this is a quote:

In Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, historian David Hackett Fischer asserts:

Some historians describe these immigrants as "Ulster Irish" or "Northern Irish". It is true that many sailed from the province of Ulster ... part of much larger flow which drew from the lowlands of Scotland, the north of England, and every side of the Irish Sea. Many scholars call these people Scotch-Irish. That expression is an Americanism, rarely used in Britain and much resented by the people to whom it was attached. ...

----

Northern Irish would be more accurate in depicting the mixed ethnicity, perhaps.

for Martin Amis read Kingsley Amis

If people agree to a new project, my feeling was that we'd do "Scots-Irish/Scotch-Irish Americans" or some similar compromise, since people outside Appalachia and the South lean towards the former term and historians/anthropologists are bitterly split on it. We could work both into the title. But again, not there yet.

Back to whether we should create a separate project:

A large percentage of people, myself included, have some ancestors where we're not sure which group they came from. Since immigrants usually just said they were from "Ireland," and since the island of Ireland is notoriously hard to leap back to, we often have to rely on analyzing surnames (good except for the many ambiguous cases) or guessing based on current religious affiliation (a terrible approach). If we separate, how do we best help those users figure out where to put their profiles? Would we inadvertently be creating more confusion for people with ancestry from the island?

We really need more voices here, so I'm hoping they'll show up. :)

I posted a request for more input at https://www.geni.com/discussions/166964

I asked there:

>>>> I'm especially interested to know if 1) there would be any anticipated issues, 2) we have researchers who'd be willing to help project collaborators, and 3) there are resources specific to Ulster Scots in America that we'd need to include.

Justin Durand made a good point in a conversation over there:

>>>> Many English families became "Ulster Scots" by settling in Ireland, and following the common migration route to Pennsylvania and down through the Valley of Virginia.

>>>> In fact, many Ulster Scots in Pennsylvania can't yet make the jump back to a documented ancestor in Ireland, and even fewer can make the jump back to a documented ancestor in Scotland. Some academics believe that there were as many English as Scots in northern Ireland.

>>>> To me, it makes sense to define Ulster Scot by their ethnic identity in 17th & 18th century America, not by making descendants prove an origin in 17th century Scotland.

From https://www.geni.com/discussions/102658?msg=911489

And now I will stop posting and let other voices be heard. :) Trying to facilitate, not dominate -- sorry!

Ashley, personally I'm fine with the project being called Scots-Irish Americans, my real question is if that is in fact accurate enough, as they were a geographic group from Northern Ireland that had varied origins.

Surnames are not always helpful. O'Reilly might be pretty clearly Irish, but Reilly? Similarly my Cunningham's from the valley of 1,000 Cunningham's -- who were quite Scottish in origin. Barnes is an Irish-Irish name, an Anglo Irish name, a Scots Irish name. Lawson is Scottish, Scotch-Irish, and English (border counties).

In my case there is no confusion. The Irish-Irish came a hundred years later (with exceptions of course).

re: Some academics believe that there were as many English as Scots in northern Ireland.

Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking about. And to nuance it more, going back to Hackett Fisher - some of these peoples were border people who lived in land with an ill defined and shifting "line" between England and Scotland.

They probably don't deserve to be called "either" English or Scots. :):)

>> That expression is an Americanism, rarely used in Britain and much resented by the people to whom it was attached. ...

Technically, the people whom it was attached are dead. It's their descendants we need to worry about ;)

I think we're caught in a transition period so any solution on naming is going to make someone unhappy. Academics prefer "Ulster Scots" but people my mother's generation simply don't know what that is. In my grandparents' day marriage licenses often asked for parents' ethnicity. I have copies of a ton of those where one or both parents of the bride or groom is described as "Scotch-Irish". The Scots might not like it now, but in the 18th and 19th centuries they were using it -- Scotch was still called "scotch whisky" and Scots was a language, not a nationality ;)

Then too, a couple of my Scotch-Irish lines have yDNA or mtDNA that put them firmly as having been originally Irish, not Scottish.

I have no opinion on the right way to do this. To me, they're Scotch-Irish. Anything else is just a silly neologism but that's because I'm old. I still say "ice box" instead of refrigerator ;)

Yep, I'm Scots Irish and my daughter's fiancé is from an Irish Catholic family. We are very different in ancestry, if you don't count both being Celtic. Clearly the resources for the two groups are different. I use many records and histories of Pennsylvania, Virginia. South Carolina in my research. What you found was the Scots Irish marrying the German Paltinates (sp?) and the Dutch Reform and the Huguenots, depending upon where they settled. Calvinist Protestants stuck together.

I use Scots Irish and understand that Europeans use Ulster Scots. Scotch-Irish is also synonymous for me.

I say ice box too.

And by the way Erica is mistaken in that MY Scots Irish family was only in Ulster Plantation for a short time. That was true of many of the Pennsylvania families that they were still going back and forth to Scotland, which was a short distance away by boat. In fact in many instances of family researchers of the early settlers there are arguments as to whether they came from the Ulster Plantation or straight from Scotland. Since my family settled with and married with others from the Ulster Plantation, my genealogist cousin and I contend they came from there whereas another equally deep genealogist cousin contends they came from Scotland. We can trace the Pettigrew family of South Carolina (Y-DNA cousins of us Petticrews) to both Antrim and Scotland.

Yes, I meant to mention that there was back & forth between Northern Ireland and Scotland in some families, and it is also unclear which members of families stayed in Scotland, which "colonized" in Ireland. When they vamoosed for America they could have gathered up from both sides of the sea before / shortly after the Ocean crossing.

Hatte, that's true of most New England lines as well. Their families had been in Ulster so briefly that they still identified as Scottish.

(Modern equivalent: my dad was born on an Army base in Pennsylvania but has identified as a Vermont native his whole life. His birthplace is wholly unrelated to his self-conception; it's his ancestry that matters to him.)

And even though most lines came over in the 1600s and 1700s, you still get the folks going back and forth between "Scotland" and "Ireland" in 1800s Censuses due to social influences here. Like you get the families who suddenly begin asserting their Scottish origin in 1850 and 1860 to distance themselves from the Hunger migrants.

Erica, since this is nearest and dearest to your heart, do you want to help put together some kind of "How to research your ancestors" section for the potential portal?

>>>> "I think we're caught in a transition period so any solution on naming is going to make someone unhappy."

This is truth, and why I'd lean towards a "Scots/Scotch Irish Americans" compromise. Otherwise, you're basically asking for a Mason-Dixon fight or class war.

I'm not sure how I feel about resources, certainly I'll contribute, but I don't have any tricks of the trade - except I'm pretty sure some of my Scots from the Ulster Plantation were not Scots at all, they were English. So I'm already confused. :(

What my parents knew, and what's on the census reports, is "from Northern Ireland." You really can't go wrong with that because it's fact based.

>> Otherwise, you're basically asking for a Mason-Dixon fight or class war.

Amen. The stories should be pointing us to one conclusion -- it's a matter of self-conception that really matters. Not academic categories. We should be looking at the families stories to tell us who identifies as part of a group, not trying to establish a "technically accurate" classification system.

Sometimes I'm able to trace an evolving story. When I can do that, what stands out is that Americans tend to take the ethnic identifications of their parents and grandparents and turn these into fractions of ethnicity. Those ethnicities are often a very poor match for their actual ancestry.

>> What my parents knew, and what's on the census reports, is "from Northern Ireland." You really can't go wrong with that because it's fact based.

A bit of caution here. I know you know this but others might not. It's fairly common to find censuses reporting inaccurate data. Different siblings even reporting different information.

For example, the censuses report my great grandfather's father was born in Ireland. Family tradition says he was Scottish. He wasn't. He was born in Virginia and his ancestry was entirely German and Swiss. It's a mystery why anyone might have thought his family was Irish or Scottish. If the line wasn't so well documented and confirmed by DNA testing, I would still be chasing a Scotch-Irish family in the same area with the same name.

I do not know if someone mentioned this already but not all people from what is now Northern Ireland were Scottish or protestant the provinces were always a mix of Catholic and protestant Irish, English and Scottish

I have some resources that I have used Erica for the early PA families.

My grandmother - whose mother was a Petticrew - was insistent that we were NOT Irish. As you know in her Victorian era, being Irish was not considered a good thing. Hence Scots Irish.

I'm pretty embarrassed by the fact that my ancestors came and took the land of Catholics that the British had seized.

Thanks Anne-Marie for that point.

All I can tell you is "my people" called themselves Irish, but not Irish-Irish, who came later, and were Catholic, and they were not. The earliest writing I've seen refers to "my lovely Scotch-Irish grandparents ...". The grandparents being born about 1790.

(And yes, the Germans got left out of the family story. How you can obliterate the Germanna Colony from your history is beyond me, but there you have it).

This is an interesting read about the Ulster Scots http://www.ulsterscotslanguage.com/en/texts/scotch-irish/how-scotch...

Wonderful read! Some of the expressions were used by my father.

With respect, you guys know very little Irish/Irish-American history and it's obvious from the terminology you're using. First, as a preliminary, there were Irish (or what's being termed here as 'Irish-Irish') in the British colonies since the 17th Century, before the pilgrims even. 800 people from Ireland and England were planted in Virginia during the period of British settlement before 1620. In 1621 Virginia, there was an Irish colony of Cork origins, at what is presently Newport News, that was planted by a Sir William Newce, who sailed on the Flying Harte. In Hotten's Original Lists -- a valuable source for 17th Century genealogy -- there exists a notable quantity of traditional Irish names. In New York, one of the first provincial governors of the colony, an Irishman Thomas Dongan, had requested more Irish settlement in 1682, and so followed during the proceeding years. There are genealogical records and preserved documents for New England, Pennsylvania, and the various other British-American provinces which show similar patterns. That's number one.

Second, you are confused on a fundamental level with respect to both 18th Century migration patterns from Ireland and the sociopolitical conditions that existed on the island at this time. It is true that 17th Century Irish settlement in Colonial America was light and sporadic, but this changed by the 18th Century when Irish ships bound for the colonies embarked with increasing regularity and carried with them copious supplies of new settlers, starting in 1718 and waning by the time of the Revolutionary War. During this period -- 1718 - 1775 -- there were three generous waves of Irish migration that have been noted with distinction, surrounded by smaller but frequent arrivals from the isle; the best estimates place the total number of Irish arrivals for the 18th Century on the order of 250,000. Of this number, about half left from Northern Irish ports and the other half took ship from Southern ports. Very simply put, only 50% of the 18th Century descendent and born-Irish colonists came from Ulster while the other 50% came from Ireland's Southern provinces. Of the Ulster half, a significant minority came from the three counties presently in the ROI -- Donegal, Monaghan, and Cavan -- which were not planted with Scottish and English settlers. From the remaining six counties there was a small minority from the stock of the indigenous population, which further reduces the number of settlers who could've claimed ancestral origins in the Borderlands. Or to frame this another way, less than half (and probably less than 40%) of all 18th Century Irish immigrants were Lowland Scottish or Northern English in ancestry.

There was no deliberate attempt to wed Irishness with Catholicism until the mid-late 1800s. During the 18th Century, most of the indigenous Irish were adherents to Catholicism in only weak and superficial ways -- and as a matter of fact, when Catholic piety reached its European peak in the Middle Ages, it wasn't uncommon for Romanists in England and elsewhere to rebuke Irishmen for behaving more like atheists and pagans than Christians. The Reformation failed in Ireland not because Catholicism was woven into Irish patriotic identity (ironically, the framework for Irish Republicanism was laid mostly by English-speaking Anglicans) but because the Protestant clergies failed to incorporate the Irish language into their religious doctrines, and it was the Irish language that was widely spoken by most of the indigenous population, including the Norman-Irish gentry. Most of the 18th Century Irish came to Colonial America as Catholics, but due to a combination of a scarcity of RC churches in the colonies, de facto bans on Catholicism in some of these colonies, and the regular disparagement of Catholicism in most of these colonies, not to mention their already soft adherence to the faith, the 18th Century Catholic Irish (or what you call 'Irish-Irish') converted and joined the local Protestant churches. By the turn of the 19th Century, most of the Irish in America were Protestant, and most of these Protestants were "Irish-Irish". What happened was a process of cultural assimilation -- that was both linguistic and religious in nature -- that took place in America and was distinct from whatever sectarian divisions and obstacles to social cohesion may have existed in Ireland itself, and regardless of how prominent or not these barriers may have been at the time.

"I know this can be a difficult subject, so as someone with both Irish Catholic and Ulster-Scots Protestant genes,.."

I know of no religious genes that have been discovered. As I've been saying, the Protestant Irish of colonial and antebellum America were mostly Irish. Even most of the Ulster settlers of Borderland stock considered themselves to be Irish until an influx of Catholics from Ireland arrived during the Famine. After the US Civil War, sectarian tensions in Ireland heightened, and in America this same perception of Irish-Catholic interchangeability took form. It was during the late 19th Century genealogy craze -- when it was entirely unfathomable to imagine any Irishman a Protestant -- that the phrase "Scotch-Irish", made popular by the Scotch-Irish Congresses, started to be thrown around with frequency and used to describe anyone who was a Protestant descendant of Old Stock genealogy and who came to America by way of Ireland. The problem with their best efforts, though, was their ignorance of immigration history and their lack of familiarity with surname origins; which is why we see, throughout the literature of this period, any and every Irish Protestant assigned the "Scotch-Irish" misnomer, regardless of whether their names were Cullen and Sullivan or Brown and Jackson, and the folk belief that they were all 'Ustermen'. In recent years, "Ulster Scots" mythologists have been at it again, only this time preferring the title "Ulster Scots" to "Scotch-Irish" and making brazen attempts at trimming the "Irish-Irish" Protestants off their roster of heroes -- and with them the better part of Protestant Irish-American history. It is for this reason, as a genealogist, that I don't consider the Scotch-Irish (or the Ulster Scots, or the Ulstermen, or the Ulster whatever they imagine themselves as next) to be a serious ethnoreligious class deserving of the unique acknowledgement they demand.

I also know of no genetic genealogy project that has discovered unique Scotch-Irish genes in the biological makeup of people who identify with this pseudo-ethnicity. As far as I am aware, the largest of these projects is being conducted at Family Tree DNA, and they have over 1,200 participating families last I checked. The genetic profile of these families is as follows,

" R-L21 Haplogroup and the growing number of downstream (more recent in chronology) is the haplogroup of the majority of the Scots-Irish. Historically it represents the 'Western Atlantic Celtic' population, which includes the Insular Celts, both Gaelic and Cumbric. In layman's language, this population has its origins in the indigenous Celtic tribes of Britain and Ireland. Within the Scots-Irish population this includes the native Cumbric Celtic tribes of what we now call the Scottish Lowlands, and the Gaelic population. This tells us the majority of the people in the New World that identify as 'Scots-Irish' are the descendants of the indigenous Celts of the British Isles and Ireland."

You're not going to find a genetic profile any different than this among the 'regular' Irish. The R-L21 haplogroup is found nowhere in the world in greater frequency than Ireland.

"Us Scotch Irish maintained a careful distinction between "us" and the real Scots (the real Scots came early to New England, for instance, as Cromwell's Prisoners of War). The real Scots were Gaelic speakers, often (but not always) from the Highlands, tartan wearers, etc."

Around 35% of the Ulster Scotch-Irish 'were' of Highland ancestry. Some of the most popularized Scotch-Irish surnames -- Campbell, McCain, McDonald -- are Highland in origin (note that I don't even believe there is such a thing as a 'Scotch-Irish' surname, but I'll play along to make the point). There was significant settlement of Highland Scots in Ulster during the 1500s, a century before the Plantation, and most of these families joined the reformed church movement and then the 18th Century migrations to the New World.

"Barnes is an Irish-Irish name, an Anglo Irish name, a Scots Irish name."

I have no idea what an "Anglo-Irish name" is. The Anglo-Irish were the upper and bourgeoisie social classes in Ireland from the Tudor period until the 1922 partition, noted for their political power; adoption of English customs in manner of speaking, dress, and living standards; and of course their Anglican religion. Some of these families were ancestrally Irish and converts to Anglicanism (no less than 5,500 Catholic Irish converted to Anglicanism when the penal laws were instituted, not including the early converts from the Tudor conquest), some were the descendants of English and Welsh Cromwellian and post-Cromwellian settlers, but most were mixed Irish-British. This is not a single ancestry, and the closest thing I can imagine to an 'Anglo-Irish name' would be a name that falls on some hypothetical list of the names of the members of this social class. Those names would be either Irish, English, Welsh, or hyphenated to reflect their mixed Irish-British ancestry. There were a lot of Fitz names held by these people (which, depending on the name, could be Irish or English), as well as names like Burke, Sheridan, Connolly, and the hyphenated Connolly-Carews (the Connollys, who were by far the wealthiest of the Anglo-Irish class, had intermarried with the Welsh Carews). Some of the more prominent members of this class bore Irish or Norman-Irish names, but were intermarried with English aristocratic families (the Dukes of Leinster, the Earls of Upper Ossory, the Guinness family, etc).

I would recommend most of you read some proper scholarship in this area instead of just repeating the various zombie claims that float around unchecked in 'Ulster Scots' heritage circles. Michael P. Carroll published a relatively recent study on the Protestant identity of the American Irish, which you can read here,

https://books.google.com/books?id=PQh3pTgmRJ8C&pg=PA1975&lp...

I'll close on an advertisement. I am currently constructing a website that will feature much of my genealogical research. The subject is Irish-American genealogy, and the focus is on the colonial and antebellum periods. The aim is to amass a large database of family histories for the American Irish, which is going to require participation from ordinary Irish Americans. Please feel free to contact me if you want your personal ancestry featured, and I will even consider publishing a separate piece on your family history, under your instruction.

Best of luck in your efforts.

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