Most Appalachian families know they are of Scots-Irish descent. Very few know what that means at the level of the surname itself. DNA testing has confirmed what the old records always suggested: the Scots-Irish were never simply Scottish. One name on this list is secretly English.
One belongs to the most famous feud in American history. And several belong to families exiled from Britain for cattle raiding before they ever reached Ulster. The story begins with Campbell, one of the most common surnames in the entire region and one of the few on the list that comes not from the Scottish Lowlands but from the Highlands. Campbell is the Anglicized form of the Gaelic Caimbeul, meaning crooked mouth, a nickname carried by one of the most powerful clans in Scottish history.
Clan Campbell dominated Argyll in the Western Highlands for centuries, expanding through warfare, marriage, and political skill until the name spread across Scotland. From there, Campbells crossed to Ulster during the seventeenth-century plantations, and a century later their descendants crossed again, moving down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania into Virginia, the Carolinas, and the mountain valleys of Tennessee and Kentucky. Then come the outlaws. Armstrong means exactly what it says, strong arm, a name earned in battle according to border legend.
The Armstrongs were the most feared of all the border reiver families, the raiding clans who lived along the violent frontier between England and Scotland and answered to neither crown. Their stronghold was Liddesdale, a valley so lawless that a sixteenth-century traveler, finding no churches there, was reportedly told there were no Christians in the valley at all, only Elliots and Armstrongs. Both kingdoms tried to break them. In 1532, thirty Armstrongs were hanged at Newcastle in a single reckoning, and it changed nothing.
Graham is a border reiver name so widespread that it appeared on both sides of the frontier, with Graham families raiding in both England and Scotland, sometimes against each other. The name is territorial, generally traced to the old English place name Grantham, meaning gray homestead, carried north into Scotland by a Norman-era family that became one of the great names of the borders. The Grahams of the western marches were considered so ungovernable that after 1603, entire branches of the family were forcibly deported, some to Ulster, where the name took deep root before crossing to America. Well into the twentieth century, Appalachian children were warned to behave or Claverhouse would get them, a memory of John Graham of Claverhouse, the seventeenth-century persecutor of Scottish Presbyterians nicknamed Bloody Clavers.
His name survived as a bogeyman in mountain cabins for two hundred years after the families who feared him crossed the ocean. Johnston demands close attention to spelling, because that single letter T is one of the most useful genealogical markers in America. Johnson, without the T, is overwhelmingly an English patronymic, son of John. Johnston, with the T, is territorial and Scottish, from Johnstone in Annandale, John’s town.
The Johnstones were border reivers of the first rank, locked for generations in a blood feud with the neighboring Maxwells, a family war so vicious it became the stuff of border legend. When the border clans were broken, Johnstons moved to Ulster in large numbers, and County Fermanagh in particular filled with Johnston families who later sailed for America. The two spellings blurred in American records, and thousands of Scottish Johnstons became Johnsons on paper. Elliott is the other half of that lawless valley.
If the Armstrongs were the most feared clan in Liddesdale, the Elliots were their partners in everything, so intertwined that the two names were spoken together as a single warning. In 1603, the year King James took the English throne and the border world ended, a raiding party of Elliots, Armstrongs, and Grahams rode into Cumbria and stole three thousand sheep, a final act of defiance remembered as Ill Week. More than one hundred riders were hunted down, and many were hanged. Surviving Elliott families fled to Ulster, especially County Fermanagh, and their descendants carried the name into the Appalachian Mountains.
Bell is so common in Appalachia that most Bells assume it is simply English, a name from a church bell or a bell maker. Some English Bells are, but the Bells of the Scots-Irish migration were something else entirely, a recognized raiding clan of the Scottish West March listed in the surviving border records alongside the Armstrongs, Elliots, and Grahams as one of the families who lived by the moonlight and the long spear. Their territory was Annandale and the country around the River Kirtle. When the border was pacified, Bell families moved into Ulster in significant numbers, and the name became one of the most common in the northern counties of Ireland before the great migration carried it to Pennsylvania and down the wagon road into the mountains.
Scott is the most literal surname on the list. Scott simply means the Scot, a name first applied centuries ago to identify a Scottish person living among non-Scots, which is why the name is oldest and thickest along the border. Clan Scott became one of the most powerful families of the Scottish Middle March, holding Teviotdale and the country around Buccleuch, and they rode and raided with the best of them, appearing in every surviving list of the great reiving surnames. The head of the clan, the Scott of Buccleuch, commanded enough riders to conduct what were effectively private military operations, including the famous rescue of a captured reiver from an English castle in 1596.
After the border fell quiet, Scott families joined the movement into Ulster and then to America. Kerr, also spelled Carr in thousands of American records, was a great riding clan of the Scottish Middle March, holding the country around Jedburgh and locked in a long rivalry between its own two branches, the Kerrs of Cessford and the Kerrs of Ferniehirst. Kerr tradition holds that the family fought left-handed by design, and that their tower staircases spiraled the opposite way from everyone else’s, built so a left-handed swordsman could defend the steps. To this day, corryfisted remains a Scottish expression for left-handed, tied in folklore to this family.
Maxwell was the other side of the bloodiest feud in border history. The Maxwells were the dominant power of the Scottish West March, lords of Caerlaverock Castle near Dumfries, and for generations they held the office of March Warden, the crown’s own law on the frontier, while behaving very much like the raiders they were supposed to police. Their war with the Johnstones of Annandale ran for decades and climaxed in 1593 at the Battle of Dryfe Sands, where the Johnstones cut down hundreds of Maxwells, including their chief, in the largest clan battle of the border era. Wilson is the name most likely to be dismissed as generic, and one of the most heavily Scots-Irish surnames in the American record.
Wilson has for centuries been one of the most common names in Lowland Scotland and among the most common names in Ulster. The name also appears in the surviving border records, listed among the frontier families of the reiving era, meaning some Wilson lines were riding that lawless country alongside the Armstrongs and Elliots before Ulster was ever planted. When the great migration began in the eighteenth century, Wilsons crossed in such numbers that the name saturates the early records of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolina backcountry. Every other name on this list rode into Ulster or was exiled there.
The Hamiltons built it. Hamilton is a territorial name carried by one of the most powerful noble families in Lowland Scotland, and in 1606 a Scottish courtier named Sir James Hamilton, together with Sir Hugh Montgomery, launched the private settlement of North County Down that brought thousands of Lowland Scots across the water three years before the official plantation of Ulster even began. A century later, Hamilton families joined the flood out of Ulster to Pennsylvania and followed the wagon road south into the Virginia and Carolina mountains. Cunningham sounds English, looks English, and is one of the most distinctly Scottish names in the entire Scots-Irish migration.
The name is territorial, from the district of Cunningham in Ayrshire in the southwest Lowlands, the exact region that supplied more settlers to Ulster than almost anywhere else in Scotland. The family’s heraldic symbol is a black shake fork, the Y-shaped fork used for pitching hay, explained by a legend of an ancestor who hid a fugitive prince under the hay and earned the family’s lands with a pitchfork. Ferguson is one of the oldest personal names in Scotland hiding inside one of the most common surnames in the mountains. Ferguson is the Anglicized form of the Gaelic Mac Fhearghuis, son of Fergus, and Fergus itself is generally translated as man of vigor or man of force.
It is also the name written into Scotland’s origin story, because Fergus Mor, Fergus the Great, is the semi-legendary king said to have led the Gaels from Ireland into Argyll around the year 500 and founded the royal line from which Scottish kings claim descent. McCoy is the most famous feud surname in American history, and a name whose real origin almost nobody carrying it can explain. McCoy is a Gaelic name, an Anglicized form of Mac Aodha, son of Aodh, an ancient personal name meaning fire, borne by a Celtic god and by generations of chiefs. The same Gaelic root produced Mackay in Scotland and McGee and McHugh in Ireland.
In the valleys along the Tug Fork on the Kentucky and West Virginia border, the McCoys wrote their name into American legend in the decades after the Civil War in the feud with the Hatfields, a border-style blood feud fought in Appalachia by descendants of the migration. The final name is the twist that proves what the Scots-Irish actually were. Jackson means son of Jack, and it is the surname of the most famous Scots-Irish American who ever lived, Andrew Jackson, born in the Carolina backcountry in 1767 to parents who had sailed from Ulster just two years earlier. But trace the Jackson male line back past Ulster and it does not land in Scotland at all.
It lands in Yorkshire, England, because the Ulster settlements were never purely Scottish. English and Welsh families planted alongside the Lowland Scots, absorbed the same Presbyterian culture, boarded the same ships, and became Scots-Irish in every way that mattered. Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, came from the same broad Ulster stream. The records remain open.
Ulster plantation documents and church registers are held at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. The 1790 census surname studies map where these families settled, and the border records still list the riding clans by name. The surname is the starting point. The county in Ulster is the next step.
And Scotland is waiting behind both.