American connections
Presidents and Pioneers
More than one-third of all United States Presidents have had ancestral links to today’s Northern Ireland - proportionately far more than from any other immigrant group.
At least 15, from Andrew Jackson (7th) to George W.Bush (43rd), are descended from the many thousands of Ulster Scots, often known as Scots-Irish in the US, settlers who left the northern counties of Ireland for the New World in the 18th and 19th centuries.
These so-called Scots-Irish were in the vanguard of the pioneers who opened up the frontier and became, in the words of a prominent historian, “the first true Americans” who helped make the United States what it is today. Yet it often comes as a surprise for people to learn that so many Presidents, generals, bankers, inventors and movie stars had their roots in the same little corner of the world, sharing ‘this stern and virile’ heritage, as Theodore Roosevelt described his maternal Scots-Irish ancestry.
To take the most recent White House occupants: President George W Bush and his father, former President George Bush, have two Ulster Presbyterian families in their ancestral tree, the Gaults and the Weirs who settled in Blount Co., Tennessee in the late 1700's. Former President Clinton, during his numerous visits to Northern Ireland, spoke with pride about his Ayer, Blythe and Cassidy family origins, representing both religious traditions.
Among the historic Scots-Irish Presidents, the best known are Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant whose portraits adorn, respectively, the $20 and $50 bills which share the pockets of US citizens with coins bearing the American Eagle emblem designed by Co. Londonderry-born Charles Thomson. It was Thomson who, as Secretary of Congress, also drafted the first version of the Declaration of Independence which was duly printed in 1776 by Co. Tyrone-born John Dunlap, publisher of America’s first daily newspaper.
The longest period for the White House to be continuously occupied by Presidents of Scots-Irish stock was the quarter century beginning in 1881 with Chester Alan Arthur, through Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison and William McKinley, ending in 1904 with Theodore Roosevelt. Following the Great War, the donnish former head of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson, was the first US President to become the most powerful statesman on earth.
Northern Irish ancestry was also the common link between American heroes like frontiersman Davy Crockett, novelist Mark Twain, General ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, inventors Thomas Alva Edison, Cyrus McCormick and Robert Morse, songwriter Stephen Foster, as well as movie stars John Wayne and James Stewart. Among today’s celebrities with similar ancestral roots are singers Dolly Parton and Reba McEntire, actor Robert Redford, space pioneers James Irwin, Neil Armstrong and John Glenn plus the wealthy Mellon and Getty industrial/philanthropic dynasties.
It was Mellon family funding which helped to establish the thriving Ulster-American Folk Park 
on the site of their ancestral homestead in Co. Tyrone, a unique museum which celebrates everything from the legacy of local boy John McCloskey, who became the first Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, to the enduring influence of the Ulster-Scots pioneers on American country music.