Posted on 04/15/2010 7:27:25 AM PDT by jay1949
So, what happened to all of those Scotch-Irish settlers and their descendants? It doesn't seem that large numbers of Americans identify themselves as Scotch-Irish (or Ulster Scots or Scots-Irish). If they do, the Bureau of the Census surveys don't reveal them. The answer is, the descendants of the Scotch-Irish settlers are legion -- but a great many of them call themselves simply "Americans."
(Excerpt) Read more at backcountrynotes.com ...
Proud American here.
Cause the “Scottish-Irish-American” label is just too much.
My deep distrust of government comes from my Scots-Irish heritage.
Proud Mutt-American, with ancestry primarily from Scotland, Ireland, Norway and Denmark, with some English, Dutch and German tossed in for spice.
According to my census reply my race is legal American.
I live in one of those areas of the country where the Scots-Irish presence left a long time ago (fleeing west to escape the flood of Irish Catholics, though not without a fight, see "Gangs of New York"), so to find a person who identifies as "American" is quite rare in these parts, sad to say.
bttt
Scotch-Irish-English-Dutch Freeper here. One side (Dutch)of the family helped settle “New Amsterdam/New Netherlands” and the other (Scotch-Irish-English) gradually worked its way from Pennsylvania to northern Wisconsin to settle on some very hilly land passed over by even the Scandinavians and Germans. Our family helped prove you can have been American for going on 400 years without becoming either rich or famous.
Scots-Irish or Scottish-Irish, please. Scotch is a libation. But that is what one expects from journalists these days.
No place on the form for Swedish-American either. So I filled in American for race.
How about Sco’ish as in “If it’s not Sco’ish it’s CRAP!”
One of my favorite books on American history and the history of my own family.....
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/oped/owens/04/webb.html
These are the “red state” voters. They are family-oriented, take morality seriously, go to church, join the US military, support America’s wars, and listen to country music.
My ‘Scotch-Irish’ ancestor, Isaac White, fought in the battle of Guilford Court House and settled in Tennessee. He is listed among “First Families of Tennessee”.
An Isaac White fought in the ‘Battle of Kings Mountain”. Some claim it was the same guy as my ancestor...but it has not been documented.
I love all this ‘Backcountry’ stuff.
Wikipedia is at least good enough for cites:
Although referenced by Merriam-Webster dictionaries as having first appeared in 1744, the American term “Scotch-Irish” is undoubtedly older.
An affidavit of William Patent, dated March 15, 1689, in a case against a Mr. Matthew Scarbrough in Somerset County, Maryland, quotes Mr. Patent as saying he was told by Scarbrough that “...it was no more sin to kill me then to kill a dogg, or any Scotch Irish dogg...”[52]
Leyburn cites several early American uses of the term.[53]
* The earliest is a report in June 1695, by Sir Thomas Laurence, Secretary of Maryland, that “In the two counties of Dorchester and Somerset, where the Scotch-Irish are numerous, they clothe themselves by their linen and woolen manufactures.”
* In September 1723, Rev. George Ross, Rector of Immanuel Church in New Castle, Delaware, wrote in reference to their anti-Church of England stance that, “They call themselves Scotch-Irish,...and the bitterest railers against the church that ever trod upon American ground.”
* Another Church of England clergyman from Lewes, Delaware, commented in 1723 that “...great numbers of Irish (who usually call themselves Scotch-Irish) have transplanted themselves and their families from the north of Ireland.”
* During the 1740s, a Marylander was accused of having murdered the sheriff of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, after calling the sheriff and his assistants “damned Scotch-Irish sons of bitches.”[54]
The Oxford English Dictionary says the first use of the term “Scotch-Irish” came in Pennsylvania in 1744. Its citations are:
* 1744 W. MARSHE Jrnl. 21 June in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. (1801) 1st Ser. VII. 177: ‘The inhabitants [of Lancaster, Pa.] are chiefly High-Dutch, Scotch-Irish, some few English families, and unbelieving Israelites.”
* 1789 J. MORSE Amer. Geogr. 313: “[The Irish of Pennsylvania] have sometimes been called Scotch-Irish, to denote their double descent.”
* 1876 BANCROFT Hist. U.S. IV. iii. 333: “But its convenient proximity to the border counties of Pennsylvania and Virginia had been observed by Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and other bold and industrious men.”
* 1883 Harper’s Mag. Feb. 421/2: “The so-called Scotch-Irish are the descendants of the Englishmen and Lowland Scotch who began to move over to Ulster in 1611.”
In Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history), 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.
From the book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
More than 27 million Americans today can trace their lineage to the Scots, whose bloodline was stained by centuries of continuous warfare along the border between England and Scotland, and later in the bitter settlements of England’s Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland. Between 250,000 and 400,000 Scots-Irish migrated to America in the eighteenth century, traveling in groups of families and bringing with them not only long experience as rebels and outcasts but also unparalleled skills as frontiersmen and guerrilla fighters. Their cultural identity reflected acute individualism, dislike of aristocracy and a military tradition, and, over time, the Scots-Irish defined the attitudes and values of the military, of working class America, and even of the peculiarly populist form of American democracy itself.
Wow! We’re practically identical. My Cherokee is maybe a little more than “minute” though.
Present and accounted for.
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