When Did Cunningham's Arrive In America?

[Profane James]

I also went to a site: Olive Tree Genealogy and read the Ships Passenger lists of immigrants entering America for more help.

Whew! What a rabbit hole I just went down with that site! No help personally, but very interesting info. Thanks for sharing.

[ctbuchanan]

I do not know specifically for the name Cunningham, but many, many Scottish names were in the Colonies by the early 1700's.

To say that the Cunninghams "emigrated" from Ireland to Scotland around 500 AD is probably too modern an interpretation of what happened. There was no customs and immigration back then. You can literally see Scotland from Ireland (and vice versa) so Celts (Gaelic speakers) went back and forth at will.

Be careful not to apply modern standards on that which happened before recorded history.

[Reiver]

The once generally accepted notion that many eventual Scots were once from Ireland has been recently seriously questioned by investigative historians that study migration.

The lack of ancient Irish place names, traditions, and cultural habit that traditionally follow mass migration lead them to believe the similarities in language had more to do with constant back/forth trade. A common language to conduct business in. There is some difference tho in q/p celt and there are no ancient examples of q celt being adopted in Scotland rather more Pict influence.

The q celt (Irish) and p celt (England/Scots) expansion is, today, thought to have been a south to north migration with the language tradition staying alive in the sea port areas and far north due to trade and difficult terrain leading to a semi exclusion.

Ewan Campbell at Glasgow University has written some interesting papers on the lack of physical evidence to support the older thesis.

He goes further that many families/clans (pre/post medieval) even embraced this Irish/Scots migration to support imaginary claims to old Royal bloodlines in Ireland that never really existed.

His conclusion (based upon much more than I've touched) is that the Scots are not of Irish decent.

Interesting stuff.

[Bruce Scott]

Very interesting!

I went on a Google hunt and found this article by Dr Campbell:
http://www.electricscotland.com/hist...scotsirish.htm

[Reiver]

To the original post.
The Irish immigrated in large numbers during the Potato famine years but the Scots came much earlier. Matter of fact the large numbers of Irish did not come until that period.

In/on my family Scots tree in 1719.

If you look at the names of towns on the South eastern coast you'll find a mini Scotland.

Many Scots immigrated thru Irelands seaports starting in the mid 1600's and that continued up to and thru the Revolution and beyond.

Some very good books out about the Scot's and their huge participation in the Revolution.

[freep]

Mine got here around 1770.