52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks
Week Two (January 8 -14, 2024)
Origins Prompt

With the interest in all things Scottish lately, I felt it may be a good topic to examine regarding origins. Many of us can relate (no pun intended!) to the popular television series Outlander on the STARZ network where much of the action takes place in the Highlands of Scotland.
The book and the series center around Claire Randall who is suddenly transported to 1743 Scotland into a mysterious world where her freedom and life are threatened. Who can resist the heartthrob, Jamie Fraser, also known as James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser, Laird Broch Tuarach, one of the main characters in this historical novel written by Diana Gabaldon? Certainly, most women cannot because of….well, you know, and a lot of men because of his bravado and his strapping Scots warrior characteristics, a complicated past, and a disarming sense of humor. STARZ and the developer, Ronald D. Moore, have done an outstanding job of portraying Jamie’s native land in the television series.

Since most of my ancestors came from England and Northwest Europe including Scotland, I thought I would investigate my Scottish ancestry to discern whether any of my ancestors lived in that area.
According to my DNA Story on Ancestry, at least 29% of my ethnicity hails from Scotland. It used to be less but if you understand how that percentage changes through the months and years on Ancestry.com you know why. Darn! I so much wanted to be more Scottish and have ancestors who lived at or near Lallybroch!! Maybe you are! Can’t you (or should I say "ken" you) hear the theme song from Outlander playing in your head?

According to my research Lallybroch Castle, the fictional name of the family estate and home of Jamie Fraser, is depicted in the series as being in the general vicinity of Inverness in the Scottish Highlands near the village of Broch Tuarach. In reality, the tower house that is used in the filming of the series is situated within the privately owned Hopetoun Estate in Abercorn, South Queensferry off narrow backcountry roads and down into a forested ravine. It is about fifteen miles from Edinburgh. The location is open to the public at various times of the year.
I have a wonderful cousin from Australia, whom I connected to through Ancestry.com about ten years ago, who has visited this castle. He and his lovely wife travel often to their ancestral localities. How lucky are they? I seriously doubt whether I will ever travel there so my research about my Scottish ancestry will have to suffice.

A bit of Scots immigration history now… This is a very abbreviated and abstract version of Scottish history, so I apologize to the scholars who explain the history much better than I do.
Because Scots began immigrating to colonial America more than three hundred years ago you may have some Scottish ancestry hidden somewhere in your family tree. It began mostly in the seventeenth century, however, few Scots came to the Americas in the first half of that century because emigrating Scots had better opportunities closer to home, most notably in Ulster for various reasons. Protestant Irish were often sent to live on the Plantation of Ulster beginning in the 1600s when the English government sought to solve the “Irish problem” hoping to curtail the Catholic influence in Ireland. Much of this upheaval began with the English commander, Oliver Cromwell. Remember him from your World History classes in high school? I know, it is complicated.
Our fictional Jamie Fraser from 1743 was from a Catholic Scot family and had Jacobite leanings. Again, complicated.
Most of the settlers in Ulster Plantation were from Protestant counties in Northern Ireland. A series of events evolved allowing England to settle Protestants in the area. The Scots Irish or Ulster-Scots as they became known remained in Ulster until about 1718 when emigration to the American colonies began. Between 1718 and 1775 it is estimated that 250,000 people from Ulster settled in the thirteen American colonies. That was when thousands of the Protestant Scots immigrated to America. But our Jamie Fraser, a Catholic Scot, was forced to immigrate to the colonies with other Scots and English, who had been imprisoned for various deeds. Apparently, the idea was that sending convicts to the colonies would cut down on crime and prison costs.

So, do you think that you are from the “Protestant Irish” group of immigrants or another group, maybe the former convict group? Or did your ancestor immigrate due to poor farming conditions, perhaps from the Highlands? Again complicated, and I am sure many of these immigrants intermarried before and after coming to the American colonies.
This very convoluted and complicated history of Scotland makes researching your Scottish roots exceedingly difficult at times. Add to that the history of clans in the Highlands, surname changes, and the political happenings in England, Scotland, and Ireland and the task becomes ever more difficult. There is one preeminent online source that may assist in starting your Scottish research journey. It is named Scotland’s People.
In fact, I have been actively researching my Scottish roots, they are on my paternal side of the family tree, and I still have few solid conclusions as to the McGhees in my ancestral line. I believe according to family stories, my DNA analysis, and my family tree that they were Scots-Irish.
Let us look at where Scots often completed their immigration journey to the American colonies during the colonial period of the now United States. Perhaps that will help.
So, where did all these Scots-Irish immigrants go to in the colonies? To where do I surmise that mine may have emigrated? Am I an Outlander, Highlander, or Lowlander?

Again, the Scots Irish Americans are American descendants of Ulster Protestants who emigrated from Ulster, the northernmost province in Ireland during the 18th and 19th centuries. These ancestors had originally migrated to Ulster from the Scottish Lowlands and Northern England. Family lore has told me that I descend from Ulster Scots, who were the Scottish Protestants who lived in Northern Ireland. Right there I probably will eliminate my Outlander or Highlander ethnicity. Darn, no Jamie!
A very many of those Scots-Irish left for North America to practice their Presbyterian religion after King Charles I attempted to force these worshipers into the Church of England in the 1630s, but over 100,000 Scottish-Presbyterians still lived in Ulster in the 1700s.
Unfortunately, the whole Ulster Plantation issue is at times confusing to Americans. I know it is to me.
In addition, dissenter families of England and Ireland had been transplanted to Ulster from northern England. What united these different national groups was a base of Calvinist religious beliefs and their separation from the Church of England and the Church of Ireland. The large ethnic Scottish element in the Plantation of Ulster gave the settlements a Scottish character.
So, the early immigrants from this ethnicity simply identified as Irish in the American Colonies. Later, during the mass migration surge after the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s the descendants of the earlier arrivals began to call themselves Scotch-Irish to distinguish themselves from the newer, poorer, and predominately Catholic immigrants.

The first Scots-Irish of the 1700s primarily settled in the backcountry of the Appalachian Mountains. No trace in my family tree that leads there. The new wave of Catholic Irish settled in and near the port cities such as Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, Memphis, and New Orleans. My ancestors lived in very rural areas and were farmers.

My Scots-Irish ancestors seemed to arrive sometime during the 1760s. Some went to the mountains of North Carolina. Could they have been my fictitious Jamie connection? Most probably not because my documented family tree shows one of my ancestors landing squarely in south-central Pennsylvania as a young child with his father, his mother having died in England the year before he immigrated. His father died in the American colonies by the time my ancestor was five years old. However, his Revolutionary War pension file dictated by him at the hearing for a pension in 1832 says he was born in Ireland. Huh?
I am still researching the ancestors who emigrated to the southern colonies. It is a tedious trail of breadcrumbs due to surnames and immigration from English ports to the colonies.
So, am I of Scottish descent or Irish? My DNA says Scottish, no Irish, but also a good amount of German! It does not help that the side of my family with these origins is on my paternal side. It gets rather murky in the family tree on that side before 1762. I do know that my paternal aunt told me that we are “Orange Irish” and we most definitely have been Protestant for the last 250 years. She told us to wear orange on St. Patrick’s Day, not green!


Given that Jamie of Outlander fame was Catholic I can discount my Scottish Highlander roots.
But maybe I am more of a Claire descendant!
Note: This is Week Two of my challenge to write about 52 Ancestors in 52 weeks. Week Three has already been published. I am just playing a bit of catch-up!
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