Good Afternoon, Class of '64
An afternoon of falling snow,
The longer flakes fall,
The larger they grow -
Some the size of a dinner plate!
(But, confession, I tend to exaggerate.)
***
Many of us
who grew up in the valley, and other places throughout West Virginia and
Appalachia, are descendants of the Scotch-Irish (or Scots-Irish) who
immigrated to America from Ireland in the 18th and 19th
centuries. There were English immigrants in this group as well as Scottish. These
Scottish and English families had colonized Ireland in the 17th
century, during the “plantation of Ulster”, in the hopes of preventing further
rebellion from the native Irish. Hard times brought them to America. 
The Scottish
immigrants were mostly Presbyterian, and the English were mostly Church of
England by faith. On coming to America, they had simply referred to themselves
as “Irish”. Not until the Irish immigration to America during the potato famine
of the 1840s, in Ireland, did the earlier immigrants become known as Scotch-Irish.
This term was used to distinguish themselves from the new immigrants from
Ireland who were mostly Roman Catholic.
Scotch-Irish American
***
Before the
1995 movie, Rob Roy, was made, Walt Disney had made a movie called Rob Roy: The Highland
Rogue. The sons of Scotland have always valued their freedom.
Rob Roy: The Highland Rogue
"Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present and future."
Gail Lumet Buckley
"People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors."
Edmund Burke
"Everyone has ancestors and it is only a question of going back far enough to find a good one."
Howard Kenneth Nixon
"It is a desirable thing to be well-descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors."
Plutarch
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