Hi Carla, There really is no such thing as a Scotch Irish name. The people who lived in Ulster and were Protestant, who later left for the USA, etc, were of the following ethnic origins: -- Scots -- English -- Welsh -- Irish -- French -- Dutch -- German etc. They came to Ulster and just as people came to America and Canada and Australia and created new ethnic groups and nationalities, so did they. So, just like in America, you can find LOTs of surnames but not a single one is native American. The native Americans didn't use surnames. In the same way, every surname of an Ulster Prod originated as something else. So there is no surname that one can eyeball and say "YUP! They were Prods from Ulster!" Usually we ask this question when we are trying to figure out where our ancestors 'came from'. You can't figure it out from the surname usually. Thorough research that is less likely to contain mistakes of course takes a long time to do, but it's possible to tell, free, in a second or two, a lot. You should check IGI. It does not have as good coverage for Ireland as for England and Scotland because Ireland's records are worse. But it can tell you free in a second if anyone beleives that your surname was in Ireland. I just did that and didn't find any. That doesn't mean it wasn't. However there are plenty of Hanchettes in England. Lots of English people went to Ireland. I checked the authoritative book on English (actually British) surnames "A Dictionary of English Surnames" by Reaney and Wilson. I checked them becauase they are viewed as the experts. We got enough bad info! It doesn't have your name, but then some of mine are missing..... It's not in Black "Surnames of Scotland" nor MacLysaght "Surnames of Ireland". It is not in Bell "Book of Ulster Surnames" though HACKETT is. It is under MacCaughey, which was anglicized to HACKETT. I hope you realize the standardized spelling is a very modern invention in English and that since most of our ancestors were next to illiterate, it doesn't matter....they could not spell their surnames. WE're going on phonetics here. IT's easy to not here the "N". The form suggests French to me. As you probably know, many French Protestants were purged in France as well as adjoining low countries. Many fled to England. However they didn't come once. THey went back when things improved and often then returned. It's hard to trace Huguenots. However when they were given denization by Parliament, we got records. You may want to find those records and see if your surname is among them. Of course (as if to deliberately do in ourselves....) the French were also settled in Ireland after too many arrived for England to absorb. There were also Flemish populations in Ireland, next Dublin in the early 1600s. Still it's clear that most if not all seem to be in England. How come did English people come to Amerikay in colonial days? SOme came on their own, paying their way on ships, often with indentured servitude, to buy land and become yeoman farmers. Many were prisoners shipped here as guests of the realm. ONe of the reasons for the American revolution was the grief those guys caused when unloosed on the local populace. After the war the British tried to land a shipful or two at our shores. In addition many paupers were rounded up on the streets of London or other large cities because they cluttered up the place and caused the usual problems that paupers do. People were actually given or purchased the right to round them up and haul them off, usually to the more southern colonies like Virginia. Though we do not have records of the early arrivals or even most arivals, we have some records extracted from records around London and published. These are named in books like "Immigrants in Chains". They're burned into CDs now. Most if not all are indexed in "Filby". That index is at your library and at ancestry. It doesn't seem to have any early Hanchetts, but you'd need to search for longer than 30 seconds to say for sure.....(I gotta dash out to buy food so I got only 30 secs). ENglish surnames in Ireland can be difficult. Cromwell in the 1650s settled his whole English army there, so you should be able to find lots of them. However those lads married Irish gals. Their children were Catholic and their grandchildren often could not speaka da English. The surnames morphed into Irish names. The ones that came even earlier were of course also impacted by the presence of Irish. The appearance of your surname as early as the 1550s in England suggests to me the name is French, but you'd want to check to make sure such a surname exists in France before deducing that. Their determination to not lose the "N" suggests that they didn't want to assimilate. Of course maybe you descend from HACKETTS who got uppity and invented a glamorous past for themselves. To see if this is a french name, check IGI and/or if you go to cyndislist.com you will find sources for French genealogy. Apparently it does exist on the continent as a surname as I see in ancestry one arriving in the 1800s from Switzerland. Usually though you have to figure out where they came from with clues in where ever they went. There are very very few Emigration records. Lastly, because the majority of people living in the backwoods of colonial America were Scotch Irish, others assimilated into it, so that descendents assume or believe their ancestors also came from Ireland when they might have come from England, Germany, Switzerland, France. If there was a community of French, etc, in your area in colonial America, a county history might ID it. Best of luck! Linda Merle ________________________________________________________________ Sent via the WebMail system at mail.fea.net