Ancestry, FindmyPast, MyHeritage and other fee paying genealogy services make researching you family’s past a lot easier. What used to take many years of painstaking research can still take many long nights of frustration but it can be done from your own home rather than racking up air miles. However, there are many pitfalls to avoid as they can still cost you a small fortune.
More than most the story of the native Irish, mainly from the counties that make up the modern Republic of Ireland, is a rags to riches tale of a nightmare start turned American dream. The Irish set the template for mass migration to the United States for others arriving without money and status.
Scots Irish Americans are descendants of expert frontiersmen and women. For centuries they defended Scotland’s border with England as elite light cavalry, then when peace arrived they moved to protecting Scottish and English protestants in the north of Ireland from native catholic Irish attacks. They moved to America with a deep sense of betrayal after rents increased despite guarantees given by the new British State. If you are protestant and one of over 30 million Americans who have Irish ancestry, you likely descend from them.
English Americans weren’t the earliest European colonists when they founded Jamestown towards the end of the 16th century . But they did provide the foundations for the United States and they weren’t afraid to abandon the home country when their interests were at stake.
Scotland’s American Revolution began in the Fall of 1759. Benjamin Franklin – then Colonial Envoy to Great Britain for Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Georgia – made his first reported trip north to the Scottish capital, Edinburgh. He spent the next two months enjoying good friends and good company in the taverns and meeting houses of a city that played no small part in the new political, social and economic ideas that would dominate the American Revolution.
