Finding My Greers: A Journey to Unearth and Understand My Family’s Roots in Northern Ireland
TEMPLEPATRICK, Northern Ireland — Growing up, I had always heard tales that our family’s ancestry was Scots-Irish, via the Greer surname that I now carry as a middle name.
But that alone isn’t enough to know where I come from — the Scots-Irish have a broad and complicated history. They’re tied to multiple U.S. presidents as well as Appalachian hillbillies. They’re also descendants of the Ulster Scots, whom the British government incentivized to usurp the native Catholic Irish and colonize the land during a period of time known as the Plantation of Ulster in the 1600s.
I decided to take the opportunity of traveling to Northern Ireland with the Covering Religion class to get to the bottom of it and try to connect with my family’s roots.
First I did a little research: I spoke with journalist and DNA genealogy researcher Anthony Murphy Barrett, who hypothesized that the Greer name emerged in the late 1300s with roots in France, Ireland, England and elsewhere in the region before ending up in Scotland and finally Ulster in the 1640s. It was my first glimpse of what would become an emerging theme during this research — how messy and confusing lineages are and identities formed from them. After all of that, what does it mean for a person to be Irish?
I was determined to learn who the Ulster Scots were, what motivated them and how they ended up with the pan-Protestant identity and motivations we see in the era of the Troubles.
Over the years, various distant Greer relatives have put together a clear trail of our family’s story in the United States, but until recently there was a gap. We knew almost nothing about my fifth great-grandfather Robert Greer before he immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1800s. Using the Family Search website and a number of other ancestry sites, I was able to track down information about Robert’s father and grandfather — both of whom lived in Templepatrick, Northern Ireland.
I contacted Ireland Reaching Out, an organization run by volunteers to help those with Irish roots trace their history.
And that was how I ended up at Castle Upton in Templepatrick on a surprisingly sunny Tuesday in March.
Volunteers Elwyn Soutter and local historian Andrew Kane graciously spent the day showing me spots where my ancestors lived and worked. No, the castle was not their property, but as tenant farmers, they lived and were buried nearby.
I also visited the Old Presbyterian Church where my ancestors worshipped.
Finally, I went to see the Templetown Mausoleum, a massive building where the Upton family members were laid to rest.
My family, however, found their final resting place outside of the mausoleum, in the humbler graveyard that surrounded it. In preparation for my visit, Kane, the historian, had gone there and unearthed — literally, he had to dig through soil — the Greer plot. I stood for a moment at a stone, almost flush against the ground with “James Greer,” likely Robert’s younger brother, etched onto it, barely legible.
It was both fascinating and emotional to take this step in putting together some pieces of my family history. But still, so many questions remain. Why did Robert leave? Was it because of economic hardship? Was it to follow a different occupational path than his family — I do know he was likely a cabinet maker in the States, rather than a farmer.
The events we had learned in class provided context for other alternatives I considered: Did Robert leave because of the penal laws Presbyterians were subject to for not converting to the Church of Ireland? Is it possible he was part of the United Irishmen and was fleeing? The years make sense — he was 17 when William Orr was executed and buried in Templepatrick and 18 during the Irish Rebellion of 1798 when much of Templepatrick was destroyed.
These are questions without answers, but what I came to understand in speaking with Soutter, Kane and Barrett is how complicated it is to fully comprehend broader power dynamics — the widely understood interplay between Presbyterians, the Church of Ireland and Catholics — and what that actually looked like for people who lived there.
My big takeaway is that the reality was often messy, and the way people actually lived did not necessarily adhere to the neat portrayals in history books.
For instance, the Uptons, although British and members of the aristocracy, were actually Presbyterian, not Church of England/Ireland, as one might expect. And there were a number of wealthy Catholic landowners in the area in spite of the prohibitions. I learned that many clerics became ordained in both the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian Church in order to make all of the weddings and funerals legal, no matter who was looking at the records.
I also learned that understanding the Ulster Scots — and my family history — involved nuance. The Ulster Scots of the 1600s were quite different from those in the 1700s. By the 1800s, my line, at least, was gone.
It made me think: When we reflect on our own ancestors, we consider them multifaceted, complicated individuals living to the best of their ability within the confines of a certain time and place. But when reading about groups of people in a historical context, we often fall into the trap of thinking about them as a monolith, and it can hinder how well we really understand the period and the people who lived in it.
“I think the most interesting part,” Barrett told me, “is that no matter how much nation-states have tried to separate us from one another, science tells us the vast population of the British Isles come from the same tribes and history.”
What I do know for certain is that several hundred years ago, a son of a farmer made a brave choice to take a chance on a new life in an unknown place. That decision, generations later, put me in my office as a dean at Columbia Journalism School and in the position to travel back to where it all started.
Picture at top: The author, Melanie Greer Huff, at her family's plot.