The Irish-American Connection

We arrived in (London)Derry late at night, in the pouring rain. We checked into a B&B, Merchant's House, which seemed much more attractive in the morning. The owners had decorated it in the Georgian style of the late 1700s.

We woke to breakfast in the bright yellow dining room. We chatted with English tourists bound for Donegal as we ate our bacon, sauteed mushrooms, and baked beans.

This is one city where what you call it tells who you are. The traditional Irish name is Derry, but when the English defeated the last Irish chieftain in 1601, they shipped English and Scottish farmers into Northern Ireland "plantations" and renamed the city Londonderry. Derry has been a war zone between English and Irish, Protestants and Catholics ever since. The Catholics called it Derry and the Protestants called it Londonderry.

Our ancestors, the Hamiltons, came from Scotland. We don't know how long they lived in Northern Ireland, but they may well have been part of the "plantations" the Irish so hated. British troops finally left Derry in 2007, after Northern Ireland negotiated a ceasefire between Catholics and Protestants. Our guide said wryly, "We were so busy fighting each other that we didn't realize the Indians and Pakistanis were buying up some of the best land in our city." We walked along the city walls of Derry, built in the 1600s and still guarded by cannons.

We stopped at Columba Cathedral, named for St. Columba, one of the earliest Christian fathers in Ireland, who built a monastery in the 6th century A.D. This was the first Protestant cathedral built in Europe after the Reformation (1628).

We passed colorful shops and bars, including one pub named "Bound for Boston." Half of Ireland's population has emigrated in the last 250 years.

We wandered through the Tower Museum, housed in a reproduction of a fortified medieval tower house owned by the O'Doherty clan.

One of the most interesting exhibits was about the Spanish Armada, which was destroyed by the English navy in the time of Queen Elizabeth I.

Spanish survivors straggled onto the Irish shore. Most were slaughtered, but a few either intermarried (the swarthy "Black Irish") or made it back to Spain.

After touring Derry, we traveled south to Omagh to visit the Ulster American Folk Park. That living history museum told the story of the Northern Irish who emigrated from Ireland to America during the 1700s and 1800s. Many of these, such as the ancestors of Davy Crockett and Andrew Jackson, were Scots-Irish, like we are. One side of the museum showed the Irish thatched homes and culture which the Irish left behind them.

We then walked through the bowels of an emigrant ship, symbolizing the voyage to America.

We emerged in an American town with signs from businesses founded by Irish immigrants, such as Thomas Mellon's bank, which became the largest bank in the US outside New York. Gamble, of Proctor & Gamble, also came from Ireland.

The rest of the park showed the American areas to which the Irish immigrated, including log cabins, covered wagons, teepees, and even a (pre-Revolutionary War) redcoat or two.

After leaving the museum, we drove southwest, out of Northern Ireland. We passed Sligo, where our ancestors, the Langs (who married the Hamiltons), lived, and through the rough, spectacular countryside of County Mayo.

We stayed at an inn in Westport, a stylish Georgian city on Ireland's west coast which was built in the 1700s for the linen trade. We found a restaurant serving fresh mussels from the bay. Night after night, the Irish seafood was superb.