What is a WASP?

[patrick1]

Can't effort post here at this hour, but couple things: much like the OP question, so much of this is arbitrary.  A lot of what is called Celtic is really re-heated 19th century romantic bull.  What is it that makes a thing Celtic and where do you draw line line? Blood/DNA, language, music, culture, religion...   There are shared bonds between Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England on most of the above but fuzzy lines also. This happens with most lands that are in close proximity and have had population transfer over a millennia. A thing to remember is the complexity of it all and how not everything fits into neat boxes.  Even in Ulster, most Scots-Irish werent even purely that. In America, you wouldnt find many purebred Scotch Irish or even English really as early as 1790 and certainly not now. Culture interchange, integration and intermingling happens. This is a great thing.  Appalachia was influenced significantly by the origins of its people and those they lived aside or forcibly displaced. New England and the larger Irish American communities have their own cultural traditions as well.  Neither has all that much to do with the "home countries".

Anyway, in common usage a WASP for me is old money, Yankees.

[patrick1]

A lot of what is called Celtic is really re-heated 19th century romantic bull.

That's for sure!

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Of course not.  The talk about white Southerners being mostly "Scotch Irish" is nonsense!

I'm guessing "WASP" is barely used in the South, given that there was never an ethnic difference between the Southern elite and working class and rural Southern whites.  Kind of a redundant term.

Well, I think it is correct to say that most Southerners have at least some Scotch Irish background.  In most you will find a hodgepodge of Welsh, Scotch Irish, Irish, English etc.

WASP isnt used because it was probably invented by a resentful Catholic or Jew in the North . 
However, I do disagree. Just because things don't fit neatly also diesnt rule out patterns. There was a religious and ethnic difference in the south.  The ruling elite in the lowlands did proportionately consist of Anglican and English background. (Many common African american surnames reflect the lineage of this planter elite) The hill folk and working class more Presbyterian/dissenter.  These exact same circumstances existed and still exist to an extent in the north of Ireland.   

[patrick1]

What attracted Northern Irish to Pennsylvania post-1800?

In Philadelphia, the northern Irish-born population was about 2/3 of the Irish Free State-born in 1930.  In Pittsburgh it was over 50%.

In most of the other big Northern cities it was usually about 15-20%.

Also, the Welsh population in PA was quite big.

Re: Philadelphia. It is useful to look at the ocean line routes from this period. People tended to emigrate on the cheapest route and with the easiest emigration process.  One branch of my ancestors went to Montreal first and only a few years later did they make their way to NYC. (this was in the 20's)  Also just because they were born in the North of Ireland, it would be flawed to assume them Protestant.  After independence, partition, civil war and then the sectarian violence, may Catholics in the north decamped from the Stormont state.

With Pittsburgh with Irish and Welsh in PA, you have people following jobs- whether they be miners or in the steel mills.

[patrick1]

Probably best to not over-analyze this.  I mean for me William F Buckley and the Kennedy clan were way more WASP in there upbringing than any Southrons. Boarding schools, Harvard-Yale, the country club, Newport, the Vineyard, white shoe firms.  The exclusivity of these WASP bastions are gone, so the term really doesnt mean anything anymore- like BRTD's favorite Catholic vote or Reagan Republican.

[patrick1]

Educational attainment among ethno-religious groups ca. 1980:

After Jews and Asians (too small to be broken down further then), Scottish Protestants were the best educated, Irish Catholics had just pulled ahead of English Protestants. Irish Protestants were further down.

http://faculty.washington.edu/charles/pubs/theeducationattainment.pdf

You can also see that Irish Protestants were more "old stock" than Irish Catholics (4th generation+) though by no means their immigration ceased.  Though we often hear about "40 million Irish Americans" the descendants of post-1845 Irish Catholic immigrants is probably more about the size of the Italian American population in the US.

From census data 35 million claim Irish ancestry while 5 million claim the Scotch Irish category.  There was roughly over 5 million Irish immigrants to the US in the period from 1830-1970. This doesnt capture significant Irish Catholic lineage population who first came to Canada or England and Scotland.  Also of note there was Irish Catholic lineage well before this in colonial period like General John Sullivan, Commodore Barry and Boston massacre victim Patrick Carr to name a few. The raw numbers started to increase in the Erie Canal construction. 

17 million claim Italian ancestry. Over 4 million Italians came to America but you double counting and there was also substantial permanent returns to Italy.  The Irish tended to stay in America for good while many Italians came to make some money and so many returned¹.  You also dont get the generational multiplying effect as bulk of Italian generation is a couple years later than that of Irish. 

¹Statistics by nationality are quite striking. According to a report in 1908 comparing the departures in 1908 with the arrivals of 1907, 61% of the Southern Italians returned home. Croatians and Slovenians (59.8%), Slovaks (56.1%) and Hungarians (48.7%) also had high return rates. The lowest rate, 5.1%, belonged to the Jews (categorized as "Hebrews"). This is understandable since they fled the pogroms to save their lives and had nowhere to return. Surprisingly, when you think of all the nostalgic songs about their homeland, the Irish rarely went back — only 6.3%. Others with a low return rate were Czechs (7.8%), English (10.4%) and Scandinavians (10.9%). In the middle range were Germans (15.5%), Serbs and Bulgarians (21.9%), Finns (23.3%), Poles (33.9%) and Northern Italians (37.8%). Interestingly enough, the Irish and the Swedish were also groups with a very high percentage of woman immigrants.

[patrick1]

I wonder how many of the Irish-American Protestants are descendants of Church of Ireland members (as opposed to Ulster-Scots Presbyterians). Also there would certainly be a sizable number of converts from Catholicism by 1980.

A lot less. They were much more apt to go east to Great Britain.  The reason the Catholic and Protestant dissenter nationalists found common cause in the United Irishmen rebellion of 1798 was because the established church held such power. The Anglo Irish owned the best and vast majority of all land, were the gentry and dominated the political landscape by law. It failed in part by the stirring of sectarian fears (some justifiable). Subsequently whitehall was able to force through the Act of Union on Ireland.

[patrick1]

Good post Torie. One point of clarification I would add is that the plantations of Ireland started much earlier.  There were plantations in the Irish Midlands under the Catholic Mary and Elizabethan plantations.  These were largely English settlements. A seminal moment in Irish history was The Flight of the Earls in 1607, where the Gaelic chieftains decamped to Europe after their defeat in the revolution of 1601.  This left a power vacuum where the land was scooped up. The private plantations in Antrim and Down were much more successful than the other crown plantations in the rest of Ulster (borne out in demographic maps to this day).  This served dual purpose because in got rid of restive Scots on the northern border and destroyed the Irish power base in the usually rebellious North. The massacre of those settlers in the civil war years of the 1640's still holds power in the Protestant community and there are banners commemorating this at every Orange parade still.  The Cromwell conquest solidified the new Protestant landownership in the provinces of Munster and Connaught.   (Leinster has been English or Anglo Norman dominated since 1270)  King Billy's defeat of Séamus an Chaca' was merely the final death knell.  As I noted above though, the dissenter Protestant community were not much better off than the Catholics and a large reason why so many Ulstermen came to America.  Thanks for giving me a forum to babble

[patrick1]

Well, sure the colonies largely benefited from the greater autonomy brought on by William and Mary.   However, were you a Highlander or Jacobin you were marginalized and dispossessed and even slaughtered- Glencoe.  And closer to home, that autonomy was forfeited as seen in Acts of Union. Insert relevant to the victor go the spoils quote.

[patrick1]

Yeah, sorry that is percentage of land owned by Catholics.  Although this really isnt a sectarian issue that I'm trying to raise here.  So much of the land was held by so few and as time progressed these large landholders remained distant.  A lot of the the Protestant tenant farmers and smallholders got a raw deal in the imbalanced power structure that was created from Whitehall. In America you could own better land for the price of being a susbistence tenant.  That is why many Scotch Irish, Anglo Irish and "natiive"  alike Catholics with means emigrated.  Of course, this power strucutre also existed in the the rest of British Isles too.

[patrick1]

The population history of England in the early middle ages is... er... contentious. It is not certain how large the migration of Germanic peoples actually was. The idea that there was a wholesale replacement of the previous population is discredited, but the idea that England and the English were created by a small settler elite is not massively popular. The situation is further complicated by later Norse invasions and settlement; again the exact extent of the latter is uncertain. And we shouldn't pretend that pre-Roman population history is simple either... or, actually, that there was no significant immigration between the Conquest and the beginning of emigration to the future United States.

I think population genetics has shown that the people of the British Isles have much more in common with themselves than the Roman, Anglo-Saxon-Jute or Norman influences. This is probably disturbing news to hucksters in certain quarters who used to/still do exploit the supposed defaults in the Celtic character or the accursed and treacherous Sassenach gene.

I did the DNA testing and fascinatingly related to quite a few WASPs. It is interesting to see the surname evolution based on when someone emigrated. Not surprising I have many connections to the O'Briens, McNamara, Slattery, standard surnames from the part of Ireland my grandfather came from.  I found that those who left in the colonial era, before surnames became standardized, had a high degree of change and presumably Anglicization. A lot of Bryan, Bryant, Slattery becomes Slater etc. etc. The primary source records from County Clare in the colonial era also shows a huge variety in surname spellings.

[patrick1]

There has been a recent DNA study showing that English men (of English ancestry ) share 50-100% of genetic inheritance with (West) Frisians while having surprisingly little in common with the Welsh.

There are a wide variety of studies that sometimes conflict. There is also variation between different regions of Britain, with some having more Germanic or Norse admixture than others. However, most studies I have seen, particularly on the maternal line,  there is large number of the genetic sampling being the original paleo or neolithic settlers.  On your study, it seems to suggest that that area of the sample had a male replacement and hostile takeover. Frequently, there was a movement of families who traded and integrated with local population. Id love to take a look at the study if you can find it.

[patrick1]

The yDNA is tested for the paternal line and mtDNA for the maternal line.  Each has their own mutation rate that are passed down.  However, it should be noted that even this fascinating view is only looking through a straw and disregards the indirect line genetic contributions.

This genetic history is all rather fascinating- very interesting and sometimes sinister is the variety that male and female lines take.  eg., more European on paternal and native and African on the maternal in the Americas.

I for one take a dim view at the Celtic label on a genetic front. Likely the Celts were another cultural conquest and had limited genetic contribution to the original inhabitants. Uncomfortable for some but evidence points that the Celts were invaders to Ireland too.

[patrick1]

I should also walk back my sinister comment because that need not be so. In pre-Christian societies and even today- successful and powerful men passed down their genes. This is borne out by the genetic contributions of the supposed Niall of the Nine hostages and Genghis Khan markers.

[patrick1]

I for one take a dim view at the Celtic label on a genetic front. Likely the Celts were another cultural conquest and had limited genetic contribution to the original inhabitants. Uncomfortable for some but evidence points that the Celts were invaders to Ireland too.

Well, I think Celtic is discredited as a category in serious studies. In the one I refered they only used it as shorthand for comparing with the modern population in Ireland and Scotland.

Yep. There are many interesting things about the Celts but really it seems to be a cultural phenomenon that swept from Central Europe out.

[patrick1]

I did the DNA testing and fascinatingly related to quite a few WASPs. It is interesting to see the surname evolution based on when someone emigrated. Not surprising I have many connections to the O'Briens, McNamara, Slattery, standard surnames from the part of Ireland my grandfather came from.  I found that those who left in the colonial era, before surnames became standardized, had a high degree of change and presumably Anglicization. A lot of Bryan, Bryant, Slattery becomes Slater etc. etc. The primary source records from County Clare in the colonial era also shows a huge variety in surname spellings.

I remember once that a woman from Ireland doing amateur genealogical research e-mailed my mother asking about a common ancestor who had emigrated to Canada in the 19th Century. It was clear from the woman's e-mail that she assumed the ancestor was Catholic, as she was, and likely that we were too. In fact we knew that this guy had been active in the Orange Order in Toronto, and had assumed that this branch of the family (like all others of mine, really) were altogether Protestant.

Of course this could be an outlier, but I kind of inferred from this story that religious intermarriage in rural northern Ireland may have been more common during certain periods than we would now think.

Interesting story, yes people should be careful of their assumptions.  Take two notorious people from The Troubles.  One born Hugh Murphy in Belfast and the other John Stephenson from London.  Now Hugh Murphy, a Catholic sounding name, was none other than notorious Shankill Buther Lenny Murphy.  John Stephenson, background was Protestant but he converted in the UK became committed to the Republican movement and was to be Provisional IRA chief of staff Seán Mac Stíofáin.

My Grandmothers side were Irish Republicans from the Monaghan/Armagh border but shared a likely Scottish clan name with Protestants.

--Interesting side note that Dublin Castle kept records on "Converts from Popery" in the 18th century.  This was for Tithe collection purposes but still an interesting document to see how many merchants and landholders made a move- whether motivated by money and connection or real faith is of course personal.