Irish names?

Question:

Irish names?

why do most blacks have irish last names?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: After Emancipation, most freed slaves took the names of their former owners. This was not out of devotion for the owner, but a way to identify themselves by plantation. This was important as a way to find other family members, as; one of the uncountable horrors of slavery was the separation of family.

These last names, as many of them sound Irish, are really Scotch-Irish. Scotch-Irish people are the result of Scottish people who the English removed of their own land by granting them colonial property. This killed two birds with one-stone: removal of Scottish people from the British mainland, and a sizable force of colonists given a position of superiority, to suppress the native inhabitants of a colonized land.

The first place this plan was utilized was the province of Ulster, in the northern part of Ireland. This is where the Irish part of Scotch-Irish comes from. About a hundred years later, America was prime for colonizing, and the Scotch-Irish settled largely in the South, where they started plantations. Scotch-Irish, due to having Gaelic last names from their Scottish heritage, can be differentiated from native Irish in two ways. Scotch-Irish are Protestant, Native Irish are Catholic. Scotch-Irish mostly settled in the South, Native Irish settled in the North, mostly in cities like New York.

Among the legacy of the Scotch-Irish is their instilled sense of supremacy, which still exists in Northern Ireland, and the Southern U.S.