If You Have These 20 Surnames — Your Ancestors Were Ulster Scots, Not Irish

FREE — The Free Records Library: 31 British and Irish archives you can search tonight. What each one holds, which years, and the exact first move. No payment, no card: https://therombo.gumroad.com/l/ejinlg THE FULL ARCHIVE — three volumes, 133 pages, for the whole route back to 1538. Code ROMBO takes 20% off, and there is a 7-day money-back guarantee: https://therombo.gumroad.com/l/ortiaf If You Have These 20 Surnames — Your Ancestors Were Ulster Scots, Not Irish If your family has always said Irish, that is not wrong so much as incomplete. Two great emigrations left Ireland a century apart, and if your surname is on this list, your people almost certainly belong to the earlier one. They did sail from Ireland. They boarded at Belfast, at Larne, at Londonderry and at Newry, and the ship's papers said Ireland, so that is the word that came down to you. But these were lowland Scots who had farmed the northern province of Ulster for three or four generations, mostly Presbyterian, and they left a full century before the potato famine. They came off the boat at Philadelphia, found the coast already taken, and walked inland down the Great Wagon Road into the Valley of Virginia, the Carolina backcountry and the ridges of Appalachia. America calls them the Scots Irish. In Ireland and Scotland they are the Ulster Scots. The twenty names covered: Dunlap, Rankin, Caldwell, Boyd, Irvine, Kerr, Cunningham, Logan, McCurdy, Crawford, Patterson, Graham, Ferguson, Montgomery, Houston, Alexander, Hamilton, Calhoun, Polk, Jackson. Inside: the private bargain two Ayrshire lairds struck with King James in 1606, four years before the official Plantation of Ulster. The sacramental test of 1704 and the rack renting that pushed a quarter of a million people out over a century. Border reiving families like the Grahams and the Kerrs, broken by the crown after 1603 and shipped to Ireland. John Dunlap of Strabane, who printed the first copies of the Declaration of Independence overnight. The nine hundred backcountry farmers who answered Patrick Ferguson's threat by crossing the mountains to Kings Mountain. And the mountain counties that now return the highest rates in the nation of people writing American as their ancestry. TIMESTAMPS 0:00 – Two emigrations, one hundred years apart 4:14 – Number 20: Dunlap 5:17 – Number 19: Rankin 6:20 – Number 18: Caldwell 7:17 – Number 17: Boyd 8:00 – Number 16: Irvine 8:57 – Number 15: Kerr 9:49 – Number 14: Cunningham 10:52 – Number 13: Logan 11:53 – Number 12: McCurdy 13:00 – Number 11: Crawford 13:48 – Number 10: Patterson 14:51 – Number 9: Graham 16:00 – Number 8: Ferguson 17:13 – Number 7: Montgomery 18:05 – Number 6: Houston 19:22 – Number 5: Alexander 20:19 – Number 4: Hamilton 21:21 – Number 3: Calhoun 22:46 – Number 2: Polk 24:17 – Number 1: Jackson Two honest notes. The first is about identity, and nothing here is meant to take one away from anyone. These families left from Irish ports, spent generations on Irish ground and are part of Irish history, and plenty of American families carry both this line and the famine one. The list is about which road a name travelled, not about who may call themselves what. The second is about the names. A surname is a door, not an answer. Most of these were taken from land, so anyone farming that ground could end up carrying them, and two families named Graham can have no common ancestor in a thousand years. Spelling proves nothing either: Kerr became Carr, Irvine became Irwin, Pollock wore down to Polk, and Colquhoun was written by ear as Calhoun, Colhoun and Cahoon. The better test is the church. If the oldest congregation your family belonged to in America was Presbyterian and sat in the backcountry rather than on the coast, that points at this migration. Put your surname in the comments spelled the way your family spells it, and add the state your people settled in. The state is half the answer, and I read every one of them to decide which names go into the next list. A like and a subscribe keeps these getting made. SOURCES AND FURTHER RESEARCH PRONI, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, church, land and emigration records Disclaimer: this video is a historical overview compiled from published works on the Ulster plantation, Scots Irish emigration and backcountry settlement. Nothing in it is genealogical proof for any family. A shared surname is not evidence of a shared ancestor, and only congregational registers, land records, censuses and testing can establish descent.