What does Scots-Irish mean?
It is the American name for the descendants of the Ulster Scots: mainly Presbyterian families from the Scottish Lowlands, with some from the north of England, who were settled in Ulster in the seventeenth century and then moved on to America. The big migration ran from about 1717 to 1775, and scholars put it at over 200,000 people. They landed mainly at Philadelphia and New Castle, Delaware, and pushed inland through Pennsylvania into the Appalachian backcountry: Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky and Tennessee. In Ireland the same people are called Ulster Scots. They are a different migration from the mainly Catholic Irish who came a century later during the Famine, different in religion, in origin and in the America they built. Around three million Americans still report Scotch-Irish ancestry separately in the census surveys, though many more are folded into 'Irish' or simply 'American'.
Useful pages: Irish in USA · The Irish surnames map · Trace your Irish roots · Coming home · Irish around the world
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica and academic histories of the Ulster Plantation and the Scotch Irish migration
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