Hi Charles, Before the Revolution people were leaving New England for PA and New York and other places with cheaper land, better climate, and better land. New England is not the world's greatest farming land excepting the Champlain Valley, for one. So many people who think their South Carolina ancester came over may find he didn't. He hoofed it down from Maine. Grandpa came over. I wouldn't look for anything Scotch Irish in New England. I'd do standard New England research using town records, etc. To do migration research, you do a standard search: www.genealogy.com/university.html has courses. In the USA very few records are organized by ethnic group. Folks remaining in Worcester assimilated into Yankee. It was like living with the Borg. There's nothing Scotch Irish in Worcester. I lived there for seven years. There's lots of records though. There are huge amounts of New England stuff published and lots of 'how to' manuals out there. None of it is ethnic oriented. Since there were not separate churches, why would there be? There are not separate records for different ethnics till they finally stopped persecuting the Quakers and such, way into the 1700s. There were societies in Boston started by early Scots and Irish -- many of their records are published. Checked there? It's not clear from your email exactly what is your brick wall. If you're trying to locate where they came from, that's migration research. See the URL above. One thing that was drilled into my head was you search ALL the records. We prefer to cherry pick. We dream up this fantasy that somewhere on the planet is a record that has the information we seek, in a readible format, near us, and certainly not on a pay per view website! This is if after 20 or 30 years no cousins surface with that record. The truth is taught in the first course of the website up there: there may well be no record ever of where your ancestor came from in the 1700s. You'll have to 1. conduct a thorough search. 2. Analyze the results for clues, and 3. then maybe do a DNA study. In any case, you are not the same man. You know a huge amount of stuff and you can search much much more intelligently. What I have found personally is that by spending a lot of time reading history as well as learning to execute the standard strategies that professionals would do, I can make progress. I am not as likely to overlook the good clues in front of me. I can make a lot more sense of what I have. I learned to turn to the back of a book and learn from the bibliography. Lots of people have spent their lives studying this stuff. They then write books and articles and even give classes to jump start our work. We can get a lot further, faster, if we use these things. I'm wondering if you've checked yours in Heritage Quest? It has a very good colonial collection. Many libraries have a subscription to it. But for your New England people you need to download the LDS guides to research in those states and then do thorough searches. If you take the colonial immigration class you'll learn there is no single record that will tell you where the ancestor came from. So you have to search everything. Sounds daunting, but if you have a guide like the LDS guides, you can find it. There's also ...what is it? The book on ships from Ulster. "Ulster Emigration to Colonial America" by R J Dickson (Ulster Historical Foundation). It might help you understand the ships. There is also a book...hmmm...where? "Belfast Merchant Families in the Seventeenth Century" by Jean Agnew (Four Courts Press). These books and a couple by Bailyn that I can't find right now will give you an idea of what it was like in the early 1700s. Esp. Agnew explains the situation in Belfast where several merchants would pool funds to outfit a ship. In London (reading British sources helps) one guy would do it. Not in Belfast. It suggests the relative wealth of Belfast to London. It also covers illegal ships that constantly plied the waters and will not appear on various logs. There is a HUGE amount of stuff on ships buried in the corespondence of merchant families, insurance records (Lloyds) and port records. They are not easy for a non professional to access. However if I had an ancestor who was a ship's captain, I'd become the world's expert in that. I'd also check out the correspondence in the Mass state papers. I would follow up on leads back to the old country. BTW the genealogies of the Belfast merchants families are NOT in the index of the book, but they ARE in the archives of this list. I typed them in. Also read Kerby Miller's "Emigrants and Exiles". He is the expert on Irish emigration. You never know what will be said that makes you realize the signifiance of some detail you have and set you off on a course of discovery. Also, if you read Agnew carefully, you will learn what SHE used to do her research and you can use these same sources to do yours. I bet you a...hmm... I donno, something, that the name of your shipmaster is moldering away in a document in PRONI related to the merchants who outfitted the ship. You just have to find it. You also need enough information to know that the man named is YOURS. The name alone does not establish identity. Have you checked "Ulster Scots and the Blandford [Ma] Scouts" by Sumner Gilbert Wood? Blandford was a town started by the SI after they abandoned Worcester. It is heavily built on New England town/parish records (they're the same) and show the itineration of this group from town to town, as revealed in town records. Blandford soldiers during the 7 years War (French and Indian): Noble, Sinnet, Stoddard, Blair, Beard, Crooks, Loughead. It has a huge number of muster rolls. The surnames in the town birthrecords are Baird, Barnes, Bement, Black, Blair, Boies, Brown, Campbell, Car, Carnahan, Clark, Cochrain, Ferguson, Gibbs, Hamelton, Hassard, Hamilton, Henry, KNox, Lawhead, Loughhead, Loyd , McConoughey, Mitchel, Montgomery, Morton, Noble, Osborn, Peas, Provan, Provence, Robeson, Robinson, Scot, Sinnet, Sloper, Stewart, Qheler, Willson, Wilson, Wolson, Word or Ward or Work or Wark, Yong (Young). Best of luck! Linda Merle