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Some Scot-Irish lines can be difficult. I have a few, they married Moravian, Baptist, Lutheran or even Quakers and so were not the typical Presbyterian much beyond the mid-late 1700’s.

One thing to remember is, they migrated in groups of friendly or even related families, and married amongst their own for decades after removing, more often than not. My direct paternal English line came to St. Mary’s City in Maryland in the mid-1600’s, and the same ten or twenty family names pop up when they left St. Mary’s for Fairfax County, VA, and also when they left there for where I’m sitting right now, a couple of decades before the Revolution.

Early Maryland history is a fascinating study, too. Established as a haven for Catholics, by Catholics, the only such colony of the 13, who were otherwise overwhelmingly Protestant. There were upheavals, wars of which we’re no longer aware, because the history is just not taught. The English Civil War had it’s counterpart on this continent, in The Puritan Wars between Maryland and Rhode Island.

I love history, genealogy was the impetus for most of it, and religion played a huge role in everything. You should give it a try, it’s not so difficult as it once was, what with so many census records, church records, etcetera, being transcribed and available online.

I found my way to that earliest known mention of my paternal surname through early Church Rolls in England, transcribed from Latin. I learned German to be able to read the Daily Diaries of the Brethern (Bretheren) of the Moravian Church, otherwise known as Unitas Fratrum. Found a Scots-Irish ancestor in those meticulous daily diaries in German, of my fourth great grandfather being kidnapped, along with his mother, by Cherokee and carried off to the Cherokee town on the Dan River. He was orphaned during the final rescue attempt that was mounted, and his mother disappeared. We assume she was herself Cherokee, otherwise they’d have been killed like everybody else was.

This is getting badly off track for the religion forum and the topic of the thread, so I’ll wrap it up by saying that this fourth great grandfather was bound out to a man, Benjamin Merrell, who became a captain in the pre-Revolutionary “Regulator War” of NC. Benjamin Merrell was captured, hung, drawn and quartered by the British at the Battle of Alamance, more or less orphaning him again. He found a home until the age of majority with the aforementioned Brethern, who had mercy upon him and took him in. Needless to say, his desendants, just as Scots-Irish as he was, were Moravian. Gratitude, you know.

So, that wraps the historical/genealogical back into the religious. For those who found my ramblings tedious or not pertinent, my apologies.