Replies

The overwhelming majority of Irish immigrants to the U.S. were Catholic, both on a numbers basis and because Ulster (the primarily Protestant area) wasn't hit as hard by the Famine (due to differences in the land tenure laws and more varied agriculture). The Ulster immigrants mostly came earlier, in the colonial and Revolutionary period, and they also mostly self-identified as Scots or "Scotch-Irish".

My people mostly came over in that earlier wave or were very much later (1860s), although on my father's mother's side there are some Great Hunger-era immigrants with Irish rather than Scots names (but they got out early and moved west quickly, so were not the stereotypical Irish immigrant of the 1840s). They went straight back to farming as soon as they got here, so they had few pretensions to gentility.

The whole clanjamfry of them were a contradiction -- they farmed always, but sent younger sons to college (my gg grandfather was University of GA Class of 1843 in Civil Engineering). And by the time anybody was paying attention they were all Methodist or Baptist, with a few Episcopalians. Not a Presbyterian in the bunch. Not sure where that fits in the social scheme of things.