The Vast majority of Lowery's
(Lowry, Lowrey) in the United States are of Scottish descent. These settlers
came either directly from Scotland or from Ulster (Northern Ireland). The
Scottish people from Ulster are often referred to as "Scot-Irish". Most
of the earliest settlers did NOT come from Scotland. They came from Ulster.
When this country was first
successfully settled in Virginia by the British, the settlers were of British
nationality. This included citizens from one of Britons major colonies,
Scotland. The first non-English nationalities to migrate to this country
in quantify were the Germans. Their migration began in the early
1700's. The next non-English nationality to migrate to this country
was the Scot-Irish from Northern Ireland. They came in masses in the 1730's.
These three groups, the English, the Germans, and the Scot-Irish (Scottish)
were the people that carried this nation into the 1800's. They were
involved in the French-and Indian Wars, the Revolutionary War, the War
of 1812, etc. They are the ones that wrote the Constitution, the Bill of
Rights, and put this country on its path to be the "Greatest Nation in
the World".
In the early 1600's, King
James 1 of England, Scotland, and Ireland, confiscated much of Ulster from
the Irish. He resettled Ulster with English and especially LowLander
Scots, most of whom were Presbyterians. The Scots who were brought
in, and their descendants, are generally called Scotch-Irish, but obviously
they were really Scots in Ireland - a quite different thing. These Scots
are the ones that later migrated in large number to the "New World" in
the 1730's. According to most estimates, there were about a quarter of
a million Ulster Scots in the colonies before the Revolutionary War.
In general non-Ulster Scots
came later than those who had sojourned on Ulster soil. Many of the HighLander
Scots settled in North Carolina. In 1769 some four thousand of the
tenants of two major land holding families, the MacDonalds and the MacLeods,
left Scotland almost in a body, settling mainly in the Cape Fear valley
of North Carolina, where some other Highlanders already were.