Just some facts from the book The Scotch-Irish of Colonial Pennsylvania by Wayland F. Dunaway. (If they came from Scotland they were Scots, if they lived in Ireland for a few generations they were Scotch-Irish) The resettlement of the Scots into Ireland was started mainly in the time of James the First. It was to repopulate a part of Ireland that had been decimated by war. The Scots who received land were not allowed to hire the native Irish, most of whom were very poor and uneducated. The two groups did not intermarry or have much to do with one another. Even then the seeds for the present troubles in northern Ireland were being sown. As has been said the British Government began to tax them unfairly, and caused the ruination of the weaving trade among others. During the British Civil Wars Cromwell also caused devastation,thus setting the stage for the immigrations of the 1700s. "It is computed that from 1728 to 1750 Ulster lost one-fourth of her manufacturing population, and that the counties of Down, Antrim, Armagh, and Londonderry "were almost emptied of their protestant inhabitants" In the great exodus of beginning 1771, Ulster is said to have lost one fourth of its population and one fourth of its trading cash within five years." In another place in the book the estimate is given at 250,000 immigrants, and the overwhelming majority were protestants. Most of them came to Pennsylvania. After the French and Indian War many of them went south along the Great Wagon Road to cheaper lands in North and South Carolina. Another book on this subject, which I cannot at the moment find, talked about how the Penn brothers and the other PA leaders were so appalled at the amount of Scotch-Irish that were pouring into PA that they were afraid they would be overwhelmed. The Penn brothers actively encouraged them to settle along the frontier. Since the earlier PA settlers were Quakers and peaceful German farmers they felt that the more "aggressive" Scotch-Irish would provide a buffer zone against the Indians, and help to secure western PA from the claims by Maryland and Virginia. The Scotch-Irish were attracted to PA because this colony had the most religious freedom during this time period. Betty

A book that has a great section on the Scotch-Irish is the book "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America", by David Hackett Fischer. I have Pennsylvania Scotch-Irish ancestry (in Bucks county during the war and then on to Lycoming county) and am always looking for information on them. Before I started doing my genealogy I hadn't even heard the term, "Scotch-Irish". Julianne