Derry or Londonderry? Irish or British? Nationalist or Unionist? Catholic or Protestant? It’s complicated.

There is so much extraordinary history here, part of which is my own personal history. About 20 years ago my sister, the family genealogist, discovered that our paternal grandmother’s parents emigrated to New York from Londonderry in the late 1800s. Until that time, we had no idea we had Irish blood. My great-grandparents’ surnames were Fife and Gilmour. You won’t find either of those on keychains in Irish souvenir shops. So how did they get to Ireland?

First, let’s get this Derry-Londonderry thing straight. Which is it? The name of the original Irish settlement was Doire (DUR-a), meaning oak grove. The English, after they arrived in the 12th century, called it Derry. And in 1613, when King James I granted a charter for the development of a British city here, he tacked on the London part to acknowledge the London guilds who were financing the project. Today it’s called Derry-Londonderry, or Derry, or Londonderry, whichever satisfies your political outlook. I call it Derry because it’s less of a mouthful and easier to type.

So why would a British king want to build a new city in Ireland? As the Protestant king of a country that just a century before had been Catholic, and was still immersed in an often bloody religious reformation, his territory of Ireland was a bit too Catholic, uncivilized, and hostile for his taste. How better to tame them than by planting some proper, loyal, Presbyterian Scots amongst them? James started in Ulster in the north, the most resistant of the Irish provinces, with what became known as the Ulster Plantation (for the planting of settlers, not crops). We call them Scots-Irish in the US. In Ireland they’re the Ulster Scots.

In a remarkable feat of early urban planning, the London-backed The Honorable The Irish Society (that’s not a typo) built a beautiful walled city for the Scots in just five years, the only completely walled city remaining in Ireland today. Why was it walled? To keep out the unruly, and justifiably angry, native Irish whose lands had been confiscated to build the city. The British took the best, high ground on the River Foyle, relocating the Irish clans to the surrounding bogland.

So how did James expect to assimilate the staid Scots with the wild Irish with a 12-to-35-foot thick stone wall between them? Well, in my humble opinion, that was just the beginning of the Troubles between Protestants and Catholics in Derry that surfaced again and again for 350 years, at times most violently. But that’s a story for another day.

I believe my great-grandparents are descendants of the Ulster Scots. Based on a tip from a local genealogist, my sister has found the Irish parishes they were from and will continue to trace their branches of the family tree as far as she can. 

So am I Scots or Irish? I’m sure in the 250 years, from the time the Scots settled in Ireland until my great-grandparents’ emigrated to America, there was a little assimilation going on. Don’t you think? I would say I’m both, but then again it’s complicated.