Ancestry surprise!

[Bugbear]

Oh, gees... I have a family member who goes around saying "cheaply-ness is next to godly-ness," and claims that makes him Scottish; that and that he buys tins of shortbread from time to time...

Congratulations on finding your Irish roots.

[BroosterB1]

Till recently the family accepted the fact that we were Irish, then I started digging; one good place to start is surname search on ElectricScotland.com. For years and years, the English used the Scots to "control" the Irish, seems the surname we thought was Irish was really Scottish.

Keep digging you may be surprised what you find.

Of course the Irish Sea is such a wide expanse that no one could have possibly sailed it before say 3000 BCE, or could they?

[BrettH]

I finished as much of my tree as I could without primary research, and the Irish connection seems to be about it. My great-great-grandmother (Hughes) was from Dundalk, in Louth County, Ireland. I can't find information beyond that, though apparently much (most?) of the physical data was destroyed. The Louth County tartan is one I could see myself wearing.

The coincidental part was when I started working on my wife's side of the family. Her g-g-g-grandfather had always claimed to be the son of Robert E. Lee, whose ancestry gets traced back to King Robert II of Scotland!

Definitely an interesting twist to my research.