Reference to Scots In Old Book, and My Family Brainwashing

[Lallans]

I didn't see your post before, sorry.

Well, it's difficult to be completely sure, in this case, other than it looks a whole lot more like this surname was adopted from the English during that time period... Anyway, it looks like they were culturally Irish before coming to America, and that is mainly what I am focused on. Also, this is one strand of the whole family tangle, there are plenty of other places and lines involved.

And I am only joking about lein and brats or velvet knee breeches.

People were transplanted to Ulster from both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border so an English ethnicity from that period is of course perfectly possible. The effort in large part seems to have been to reduce the ingrained fighting and general scrappiness of the people in the Border Marches following the union of the two kingdoms, so I would suggest that groups on both sides of the original border were culturally all but identical- certainly they seem to have switched sides just as readily as any group of people, historical or present-day, in the same situation. If you have a name that could be either English or Scottish or Scottish Lowlander, one way to decide which side your family would be on is to study where they landed in Ulster- for obvious reasons they usually weren't mixed in their new settlements.