Ulster Scots Words, Phrases, Humour, Tradition and Video Archive.
Ulster Scots / Scots Irish USA
U.S. census data (2000) confirms that Maine has, per capita, the highest percentage of self-identified Scots descendants in the entire USA, and ranks third in the country for the people that are known as the Scots-Irish. The Maine Ulster Scots Project is dedicated to exploring this ancestry and in the videos on this page Jane Veitch visited Maine and New Hampshire to learn more about the migration of 1718 from the North of Ireland and the close links that there has always been between the two places. Learn more about Belfast Maine and Londonderry New Hampshire and how the skills that emerged from both curiously mirrored those that emerged from their mother cities three thousand miles across the Atlantic.
Learn about the Ulster Scots migration of 1718 when hundreds of Presbyterians battled the Atlantic Ocean to the New World to escape bad harvests, famine and persecution by crown forces.
The McFadden family had lived on the River Bann at Coleraine and were on one of the ships from 1718 that sailed up the river and out to the Atlantic. Meet Brad McFadden one of the original family's descendants
who has excavated near his home and found some interesting artefacts.
The Rev James McGregor who led the 1718 migration is buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, Derry New Hampshire.
The oldest of the settlers was Peter Cochrane. He was 92 when he made the journey. A veteran of the Siege of Derry, this means he was 63 when he fought against the Jacobites. Astoundingly he lived for another four years in New Hampshire before he died.
The Ulster Folk Park in Omagh Co Tyrone celebrates the links between the New World and Northern Ireland, concentrating on the emigration of the Catholic Irish who escaped famine and starvation. of the mid 1800’s. The Presbyterians known as the Scots Irish had made the same journey 200 years previously and it is interesting to see how many of the best known figures in the United States have roots in Northern Ireland.
Belfast Maine was named after Belfast Northern Ireland because the settlers wanted to remind themselves of home. But the similarity does not just rest there. The skills born in Belfast were exported with the settlers
and so Belfast Maine inherited some very fine qualities in terms of its key industries.
Londonderry/ Derry Northern Ireland saw its name replicated in New Hampshire with Londonderry and Derry. Yet again the indigenous skills were replicated between the two locations so that linen and weaving becomes the hall marks.