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Archiver > Scotch-Irish > 2011-04 > 1302286738


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Subject: [S-I] Ancient Scots/Irish ties and info
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2011 18:18:58 +0000 (UTC)
In-Reply-To: <1807046851.831471.1302285601562.JavaMail.root@sz0165a.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net>


Hi folks, as the administrator, I generally I strongly discourage discussing Scotland on this list for a number of reasons, such as:

--- Our focus here is tracing ancestors in and back to Ulster, not Scotland. Just as doing immigration to Canada or Brazil is different from US immigration work, it's different for Scotland and Ireland. People trying to connect up with people in or from Scotland are not the same as those researching Ulster ancestors. Furthermore -- the techniques are vastly different. We focus on Ulster. When you want to try to trace them back to Scotland, you need other expertise.

-- Scotland and Ireland had very different legal systems and led to very different records situations. For one thing, sassines. You do not hear the word spoken or written in Irish genealogy. It's a Scottish thang (with bleedovers into northern England) . By the same token, you got censuses in Scotland back to 1841. You don't have a complete Irish census till 1901. You use census substitutes in Ireland. You use censuses in Scotland. The quicker we can learn they're different, the faster we'll find our ancestors.

-- The established church in Scotland was Presbyterian and you'll find most people in the voluminous and well indexed records. The Presbyterian church in Ireland was illegal at certain times in its (or rather 'their') history: the records tend to start in the 1800s and they are not aggregated in one spot or well indexed. Irish Presbyterians were congregational and didn't go to church in a geographical parish. (Ireland does have two kinds of parishes: civil -- obsolete Church of Ireland and Catholic. Note neither is Presbyterian). This one can confuse the newby. A newbie comes here and asks "Where are the parish records for Presbyterians in Ulster?" This person doesn't understand Presbyterianism in Ulster.

So genealogical posts are definitely discouraged in an attempt to educate you that it's a different thing and we're trying to be experts in the Ulster genealogy, not the Scots.

However over on the DNA-R1b1C7 list they're having some mighty interesting discussions. I'll share the links. If it is in Ulster, most likely it's get a Scots component. This is true of the music, the Irish spoken there, the food, and of course the people. Their discussions involve medieval connections and some DNA insights. Also a list of DNA breakdown by Scots surname was given on another list -- URL below.

You can browse the list here:
http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/other/DNA/DNA-R1B1C7.html

<Someone posted a link to this picture today on EUpedia. It has Galloway and
> Dumfries as a Gaelic region unlike the rest of the Lowlands.
>
> "One interpretation of the linguistic divide in 1400, here based on
> place-name evidence. Blue is Scottish Gaelic, yellow is English and Norn in
> the north."
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Languages_of_Scotland_1400_AD.svg

>There is a very interesting paper on the distribution of writtten medieval Scottish Gaelic here with some interesting maps at the end:

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/4940/1/MacCoinnich4940.pdf

>MacCoinnich, A. (2008) Where and how was Gaelic written in late
>medieval and early modern Scotland? Orthographic practices and
>cultural identities. Scottish Gaelic Studies, XXIV . pp. 309-356. ISSN
>0080-8024

A very esoteric article.

There is a lot of discussion on Galloway clans in the late medieval timeframe. This is not the list's forte. It's focus is the type of Irish DNA called once, R1b1c7 (just call it M222 today), but you have a lot of it in Scotland and there is speculation it actually originated there and was brought to Ireland by Niall. We are on the verge of possibly being able to tell since FTDNA has announced 100 marker DNA tests. This may help us discover markers downstream from M222 that will let us determine if it evolved separately in Scotland or if the Scottish M222 is just drifting over from Ireland.

http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/DNA-R1B1C7/2011-04/1302013684 has a lot of info on Galloway clans. Being adjacent to Ireland, which you can see when the sky is clear, many of the surnames in Galloway are in Ulster too. Which is why it might interest us.

The genealogy-DNA list summary of Scottish surname DNA types here:
http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/genealogy-dna/2011-04/1302140267

NOTE: all of the R1b's are NOT "Gaelic" or "Celtic". Most European men are R1b including Germans. My father is R1b and his DNA, I am told by experts though it seemed that way from my investigative stumblings too) Frisian (aka German). You have to test for certain specific mutations within the Atlantic Modal to sort the Frisians from the presumed Celtic speakers, who are presumed to be in different places, but we don't know...now some think the Germans who spoke the ancestor of Old English were in what would some day be England and Scotland before the Romans. The more we learn, the less we seem to know.

The maps at the end of the MacCoinnich article are very nice indeed. The experts in Irish culture and language on the R1b2c7 list are doing a good job of shaking the tree. It's clear how Gaelic Galloway is by how much they know is attributable to the area. The real expert is John Lochlan. If he says it, it is probably right.

Linda Merle

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