Mar18
I’m typing this on St. Patrick’s Day. I always love St. Paddy’s Day, and even more after finding some Irish roots. I was thinking today about ancestors — I think today is a time when many people think of Genealogy and Ancestry– and I began remembering what my Mom used to tell me when I would ask her about her ancestry. My Mom was the daughter of a Vaughan woman, but she didn’t know much about her father’s family, which was Myers. She thought they were French and came from New Orleans (they were actually German and came from Indiana). The Vaughans, she used to claim, were “Scot-Irish” she thought. I always thought that was an interesting group to belong to — not just Irish but Scot Irish. Of course I’m pretty sure she was wrong here too, as the Vaughans were Welsh instead of Irish or Scot-Irish. If you go to Winkipedia.org, you can find a lot of stuff about the Irish and even Scot-Irish. It explains who they actually were (Ulster Scots, or Scottish and English people settled in Northern Ireland by the English to help subdue the Irish after the English had taken over the Island). Today the area they came from makes up Northern Ireland. It is an interesting article at Winkipedia. Until I saw William Vaughan’s Y-DNA match other unrelated Vaughans, I had wondered if maybe he was actually not Welsh but maybe was Irish or Scot-Irish. Some said his middle name was Patrick, remember. Thankfully, Y-DNA testing has lead me away from that, as his DNA matches other Vaughans with a Welsh tradition of ancestry. Still, I’ve always been interested if there were any Irish connections. A book on the early Dark Ages I was reading mentioned that Irish tribes raided what is now Wales quite a few times after the Romans left Britain. Some may have stayed there and intermarried with the population. So our Vaughans could have distant Irish roots.