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It's not clear how many of the Scots-Irish arriving on our shores were descended from the Scots Protestant settlers of Ulster and how many may have been Protestants or Catholics from other parts of Ireland or with deeper Irish roots. There's some speculation that at least some of them were Irish Catholics who were forbidden to practice their religion or who just didn't have access to priests, and gradually adapted to the Protestantism around them. Such was also true of many Highland Scots who emigrated to America. Nominally Catholic, it was hard for them to find priests in the Highlands or in America, so they gradually assimilated to a Protestant enviromnent.

I don't have any knowledge to prove such claims, though. Ulster estimates are that the great mass of those who came from Ireland to America from 1717 to 1800 were Scots-Irish Presbyterians, but at least 20,000 of 250,000 were Gaelic Catholics (and 20,000 Anglican Anglo-Irish). Whatever the actual numbers were it's long been said that throughout the colonial period there were Irish Catholics who became deracinated and assimilated into Protestant America.

>>>It's not clear how many of the Scots-Irish arriving on our shores were descended from the Scots Protestant settlers of Ulster and how many may have been Protestants or Catholics from other parts of Ireland or with deeper Irish roots.

It seems there are many of them in the Eastern Canadian provinces -- you can see their restored, historical Catholic churches along the road.

After your comments, I wonder if they migrated there from the colonies after the Revolutionary War with many British sympathizers who fled payback by their neighbors.

Hoppy

That rings true, x, as far as I know. I have a few ancestors who fought in Dunmore's War. I'm no expert on this by any means. My main effort in this journey was to land each line on shore and have some idea why they made that journey.

WAAY back when, I thought it might take, oh, say, 5 years. HA!

Still searchin' ... and wishin' I had you're catchy user name. ;)

Western PA (my area) was settled by Scots-Irish pioneers in the 1700's. Once the Indian attacks stopped, more settlers poured into this area, to the three rivers of Pittsburgh, then sailed westward down the Ohio River.

Presbyterian ministers traveled on horseback to the various settlements, baptizing and marrying and preaching the Gospel, until the settlers built their own churches. A seminary was established in PA that educated young men to be ministers in the developing congregations.

but at least 20,000 of 250,000 were Gaelic Catholics (and 20,000 Anglican Anglo-Irish)

I had always heard that the Scots-Irish were just Scots who migrated from Scotland to N. Ireland and then some years later to the American colonies. It was only recently that I found out it wasn't just poor Scots who were pressured/ enticed/ whatever to migrate to Ulster by the Brit government. There were also quite a number of poor English who went with them (to N. Ireland and then to America).

My mother-in-law's family (Funston - probably derived from "Fen stone") has typically been called "Scots-Irish" but in reality was neither. They emigrated from the Fens - a very poor, marshy area (i.e. lousy land for agriculture) in eastern England to Ulster at the same time as the Scots did, and then later most of their family emigrated to America. So apparently, the English encouraged all sorts of poor Protestants - whether Scottish or English or Welsh - to become the fodder for their experiment to pacify Catholic Ireland.

Their story reminds me of another "double migration". The "German-Russian" immigrants to America were farmers first invited from Germany to farm untilled areas of Russia/Ukraine by Catherine the Great - the German princess who married a Czar and inherited the throne after his death. Her terms were extremely generous for those days - they got to keep their language and religion, could run their own schools for their kids, were free from heavy taxation for at least some number of years, etc. etc. When a later Czar rescinded the agreement and started violating all of the above terms, they left for America.

I'll just bet that all those diehard Johnny Rebs who left the South and started a colony in Patagonia rather than submit to Northern rule were all Scots-Irish.