Scots-Irish

[Bugbear]

Very interesting posts. I suppose this forum gives a biased view on the American public. I'm starting to get the impression maybe Scots/Scotch-Irish/Irish/whatever heritage and culture arent as important aren't as important to the majority of people as I previously thought.



I suppose you could say that those of English and Scotch-Irish descent have now just become un-hyphenated Americans.

This was the statement I was responding to. I probably misread, "this forum gives a biased view on the American public." I thought you meant our focus on all things Scottish here on the forum.

Sorry about that. We do sometimes tend to try to stretch and connect everything back to Scotland here, though.

[Blackrose87]

This was the statement I was responding to. I probably misread, "this forum gives a biased view on the American public." I thought you meant our focus on all things Scottish here on the forum.

Sorry about that. We do sometimes tend to try to stretch and connect everything back to Scotland here, though.

Fair enough Bugbear
No, I just meant that the views, interest and knowledge in things Scottish, Ulster-Scots or Irish probably don't reflect those of the majority of Americans.

[Bugbear]

Fair enough Bugbear
No, I just meant that the views, interest and knowledge in things Scottish, Ulster-Scots or Irish probably don't reflect those of the majority of Americans.

Yes, you are right.

Arthur Herman's book tended to attribute anything that a person with Scottish ancestors did (the diaspora) to being something that Scotland did, and it leaned toward all the good stuff; it was subtle, but kind of misleading as far as I'm concerned.

[EagleJCS]

As a 1/2-hillbilly bluegrass-er I'll have to wade in on a technical yet poignant point here, to wit: Bluegrass, the popular genre begun by Bill Monroe in the 1940's South, is actually a separate music group from what is considered "mountain music," though they might often sound very similar as mountain music is generally the base layer of blue grass with a good smattering of country-blues mixed in (depending on who you're listening to). In addition, much of "mountain music" IS directly taken from the folk songs of the British Isles (I will refer you to Ms Jean Richie's Field Trip album). Many times the lyrics are altered to reflect the new local, but they are nonetheless very strongly related. One of the best examples I know is Shady Grove: what many folk will recognise as a traditional Blue Grass song but that was taken from traditional mountain music (just give some extra country-blues licks possibly) and before that was an English/British folk song. In fact I heard the Scottish trad band Session A9 play a version of it in Inverness at the Highland festival there. When I recounted the fact that it was a traditional Bluegrass song to one of the band members, he turned his nose up and said it was actually an English folk song, though he also admitted the band's source for it was The Grateful Dead, of whom Gerry Garcia had his own Bluegrass band called Old and in the Way. Hmmmm...

I did say, 'once known as ...'. I was basing this on what I heard in a recent PBS documentary on Bill Monroe and the development of Bluegrass music. In the early days of the genre, before the 'bluegrass sound' was named as such in the mid-1940's, it was lumped in as a variant of Appalachian music, aka 'mountan music'.

Anyway... wayyy OT from the OP.

[Blackrose87]

I am not sure what I can say here that will satisfy. My original comment referred to Scots Irish culture in America, or was intended to. I have made several references to ALBION'S SEED as well as my ancestral connections to the Ulster Scots. I have attempted to cite aspects of life among American descendants of Ulster Scots that I believe connect directly with their forbears. Without being an academic or resorting to pedantry, I will say that I am a literate, well-read professional.

Last night I was eating with friends. We were discussing genealogy and the changes wrought in the field by dna testing. My companions were a historian, a doctor of Material Physics, and two lawyers. One lived in London for a year and retains an interest in British culture. The other devoted several years of his life to travel through Europe and the Middle East and maintains an international legal practice. I would suggest that, for sheer academic credentials, literary curiosity, and brainpower, my four companions were as cultured a group as you might hope to encounter outside of academia or perhaps some embassy. All five of us were born in South Carolina and have some degree of Ulster Scots ancestry.

I asked about Ullans and none of them knew what I was talking about.

Onywey, I ken yer thochts aboot the hamely tongue. Mebbe it's no faur ben in Americae, but it's aye daein grand in norlin Airlann.

[Bugbear]

Scotland: A Very Short Introduction, by Rab Houston (Oxford UP, 2008) refers to an ongoing, modern phenomenon as "spoken Scots" in Northern Ireland , describing it as associated with… political sounding stuff… (127).
I'm guessing this is "Ullans." I don't recall anything about it in the Very Short Introduction for Northern Ireland, though it explained the political sounding stuff in detail.
Ug, too much reading to find anything.

[O'Callaghan]

The federal government sees pretty much anyone of white European descent as not ethnic, but it wasn't always so.

Moreover, the stats for the 1840-1920 period show German and Russian immigrants as each outnumbering all those from the British Isles added together. Before 1840 there were no US immigration stats (because there was no immigration control), so it's all anecdotal evidence as to where people came from, and after 1965 the family reunification system was adopted, leading to a perpetuation of hispanic and asian immigration, as those were the most recent immigrants at that time.

If there ever was a period of mostly British immigration to the US, we must look to the period before 1840, because we know for sure it never occurred after that, and there is plenty of evidence of, for example, Dutch and Swedish immigration before 1840.

General Custer manufactured a splendid English pedigree for the Custer family, although in reality his forebears were Kuesters from Holland and Custer isn't an English name atall. That's only an example. He wasn't the only one, and even now I'm sure many people assume English ancestry without actually knowing where their families came from.

There are also many Americans with Mc/Mac names that have no idea whether their surname is Scots or Irish, or worse, they are sure which it is but they are wrong. I have been told with a straight face that Mac is Scots but Mc is Irish, which of course is balderdash, as either can be either. In the face of that, I'm sure that Americans who identify as Scots Irish may be correct, or they may be any combination of Scots or Irish or both, and if the latter may well wrongly believe that this is what the term means.

[Gael Ridire]

Ditto to the above about many Americans of Mc/Mac not knowing their origins. I was attending a Scottish festival some twenty years ago and a young woman came up to a clan tent wanting to know what tartan look like for her McCarthy family. She had know idea that the surname origin was south-west Ireland.

[McElmurry]

Ditto to the above about many Americans of Mc/Mac not knowing their origins. I was attending a Scottish festival some twenty years ago and a young woman came up to a clan tent wanting to know what tartan look like for her McCarthy family. She had know idea that the surname origin was south-west Ireland.

MacLysaght’s The Surnames of Ireland is very enlightening as he covers Irish-Irish, Scots-Irish, and English-Irish names. These are names in Ireland so they do not include variations that happened on this side of the pond.

He lists McElmurry as being common in Fermanagh and Tyrone while Gilmore originated in County Down. So did the name go from County Down to Scotland and then back to Ulster during the plantation? I have no way of knowing. But in 1850 in Arkansas they considered themselves Scotch-Irish and they were Methodist and Baptist.

So if my family was in Ulster for 300 years, Scotland for 100 years, Ulster for another 100 years, and then the USA for 250 years does that mean I should wear Ulster or County Down or Morrison? At least I can say I honestly considered the uncertainty before making a decision on which tartan to wear. I realize the distinction between Ireland and Scotland is very important to many people and I try to respect that, but from 250 years away in California Norse-Gael in the general vicinity of the Irish Sea may be as good as it gets for me.

[O'Callaghan]

I realise that in many cases it is a matter of probability rather than certainty. I can't trace my line back to Ceallachain of Cashel, for example, but I can trace them back to Cork, and it is an unambiguously Gaelic name. Others may not be so fortunate as to get that far.

The issue of Scottish v Irish is more complex than it appears.

AFAIK, a group of Gaels from the Dal Riada tribe, from Ulster, Ireland, settled in Argyll, Scotland around the 10th century, about 100 years before surnames appeared in Ireland, and surnames only appeared in Scotland even later than that. In both places most surnames came from given names, so you have largely unrelated clans on either side of the Irish sea that have the same name only because their founders had the same given name. The Irish McGraths and Scottish McRaes originate in the same given name, but are not directly related. A more familiar example is Kennedy, where the Scots clan is separate from at least two separate Irish clans, all founded by men whose given name was Cenneidhe.

Then you have the plantation about 500 years later, where mostly lowland Scots moved to Ulster, but they did include a proportion of highlanders whose ancestors may have came from Ireland in the first place. I know a feller who is an Ulster protestant who has a scroll proclaiming his surname to have originated in Argyll, exactly where the Gaels first landed in Scotland from Ireland hundreds of years before his family went from Scotland to Ireland!

If that weren't enough, you have clusters in Glasgow and other places in Scotland where there are people of more recent Irish catholic origin, who came to Scotland from Ireland around the 18th and 19th centuries. In fact, there is one guy who may be distantly related to me who claims our family came to Cork, Ireland from Glasgow, Scotland. Even if true, it is a Cork name, so if they did that they must have gone to Glasgow from Cork first! Moreover, he has them living in Cork in the early 18th century, which is perhaps a little early for them to have emigrated from Cork to Glasgow and then back again to where they came from, but nothing is impossible.

OTOH, someone who assumes MacCarthy to be Scottish because it begins with Mac has not done much homework. Maybe she was just beginning to figure out where they came from. Actually, the MacCarthy clan and the O'Callaghan clan are both descended from Ceallachain of Cashel, along with the McGraths, the Sullivans and one Kennedy line (but not the one leading to JFK, that one comes from the Dalcassian tribe, and all the above are Eugenians).

However, it is believed that some took the name upon joining the clan, which makes all our Irish bloodlines a little shaky. Am I descended from a king of Munster, or just from someone who joined the clan? I don't know, and probably never will. The truth is, that particular question probably applies to most people who claim membership of any clan, whether Scottish or Irish. It doesn't affect their membership of the clan, but they may or may not be a descendant of its founder.