Red~Handed

If you have McAlpines, Hamiltons or Leslies in your family tree, you may have studied Scottish records and dreamed of finding them and their cozy cottages or stately homes. But in reality, you’ve maybe looked in the wrong place—or, more accurately, in the right place but at the wrong time.

A great many of our ancestors who have Scottish surnames actually were part of a community of Scottish emigrants who settled in the north of Ireland generations before their descendants came to America: the Scots-Irish. These were descendants of Protestants from Scotland and England who populated Ulster (the northernmost province of Ireland). More than 1.5 million Ulster Scots left Ireland between 1718 and 1890, and many thousands of them arrived in the American Colonies before the Revolutionary War and loomed large in American social and cultural history.

Despite the important roles these Scots-Irish played in the settlement of America, they can be difficult to trace. The first challenge is that your ancestral hometown—the most important detail for research—is difficult to find for those who have families from Ulster