Quote Originally Posted by Canuck of NI View Post
They were local boys (to me) and according to that traditon they were Scots Irish. They were certainly Irish Protestants so we're going to claim them anyway, both based on their fighting natures and also according the admittedly shakey notion that the native Irish of the period never were Protestants.
The family was of the Irish Catholic gentry and Jacobites, but Sir William, being the politically pragmatic fellow he was, converted to Anglicanism and abandoned most of his family's pro-Stuart leanings.

T.