If your family is Scots-Irish, it did not arrive in Appalachia in one leap. It came down a chain of towns, a county at a time, over about seventy years — and at nearly every stop, somebody wrote the family names down.

This video walks that whole route, from the wharf where the ships from Ulster tied up to the last settlement over the mountains. Fifteen towns, in the order your ancestors reached them, with real surnames read out at each one from land warrants, church deeds, squatters' lists, petitions and gravestones.

The fifteen stops, in travel order:
New Castle, Delaware · Donegal Township, Pennsylvania · Paxtang · Shippensburg · Chambersburg · Carlisle · Marsh Creek, now Gettysburg · Winchester, Virginia · Staunton · Lexington · Abingdon · Salisbury, North Carolina · Charlotte · the Waxhaws · Sycamore Shoals, Tennessee

In this video you'll discover:
The 1765 squatters' list naming forty-five Ulster families living on Penn land with no deed between them
Why James Logan settled them on the frontier on purpose, in his own words
How the Penns licensed Irish families onto ground they had not yet bought from the Six Nations
The Augusta County court records, and the long run of Mc surnames in them
Benjamin Borden's grant, the tract the settlers themselves called the Irish Tract
The 1773 map that names 224 households in one North Carolina congregation
The Waxhaws, and the Ulster couple who arrived in 1765 and whose son became President
The 1776 Watauga petition, signed by men who were governing themselves outside any colony
Why Appalachia was never purely Scots-Irish, and what the 1790 surname studies actually show

Whether your people ended up in Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas or the Virginia mountains, this is the road they took to get there — and the records that still carry their names.


#ScotsIrish #Appalachia #Ancestry #Genealogy #FamilyHistory #AmericanHistory #Surnames #GreatWagonRoad