Wayland's sketches of Rockingham County natives and other persons who had become identified with the county or the City of Harrisonburg reflect a wide variety of occupations, achievements and interests inasmuch as they include farmers, businessmen, educators, preachers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, jurists, statesmen, soldiers, writers, and so on. Part I, the larger of the two components of the volume, consists of extended biographical sketches, with accompanying portraits, of Wayland's contemporaries. The subjects' careers and civic interests are covered in some detail, as is each individual's date and place of birth--and sometimes death-- and the names and dates associated with the subject's marriages and children. Part II features shorter, un-illustrated essays of a few hundred Rockingham County luminaries of bygone years, any number of whose lines are extended back to the 1700s.

The 4,000 immigrants listed in this volume were Protestant refugees from Europe who came to South Carolina on the encouragement of an act passed by the General Assembly of the Colony on July 25, 1761, called the Bounty Act. Arranged chronologically, and taken verbatim from the original Council Journals, 1763-1773, the information given in the certificates and petitions for lands under the Bounty Act includes the date and the location and acres granted. In some cases the immigrants are listed with their age, country of origin, and name of the vessel on which they arrived. An excellent index provides references to more than 4,000 names in the text. This book is indispensable in attempting to locate an ancestor's place of settlement in South Carolina.

Beginning with the origins of their population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the author traces the Scotch-Irish development from Lowland Scotland to Northern Ireland to the American colonies. Arriving in the East, the Scotch-Irish were characterized by other colonists as being fiery tempered, stubborn, hard drinking, and very religious, and they quickly made lasting impressions. Though the Scotch-Irish were in the minority, they managed to impact history. Most notably, they introduced the appeals system and the checks and balances system.

"This essay by Rodney Green on migration from Ulster to the Carolinas, particularly South Carolina, in the period leading to the War of Independence can well lay claim to being years ahead of its time. It confirms that Presbyterian ministers continued to be involved in the organisation of congregational removals from Ulster. At the same time, Green's research is also quite possibly among the earliest to contend that, by the mid-eighteenth century, the motive for emigration from Ulster to the New World being linked to a strong sense of religious persecution had by then been replaced by economic factors, mostly associated with agriculture and land holding in Ulster"--Page 4 of cover

They left Ireland by the boatload to head for America before the Revolution, and settled on the rugged western frontiers of the colonies. The descendants of Scotsmen who had colonized the Irish Kingdom of Ulster, they lived for several generations on Irish soil before heading across the Atlantic and the backwoods of America. They founded communities in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and the Yadkin River valley of western North Carolina, eventually crossing the Cumberland Gap for the Kentucky frontier. For those Scots-Irish immigrants, life was a test of hardiness, hardship, and endurance, but frontier families also managed time for horseracing, gambling, and socializing - despite their strict Presbyterian ways. They founded churches and helped mold the governments of the new country. Scots and Scotch Irish offers a view of that time and place, along with thousands of names of those early settlers, drawn from church records, military rolls, deeds, court records, and newspapers of the time, all listed alphabetically in a series of appendices by source.

The story of the Scots-Irish is one of the struggles and achievements of an American immigrant group that existed for only a short period, whose descendants continued to make their marks on the young country for generations. From the North of Ireland to the backwoods of the American frontier, the tale of the Scots-Irish includes a massive exodus to the New World, where they founded communities in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and the Irish Tract of North Carolina during the Revolutionary War era. Containing nearly six thousand names of documented settlers of the primarily Scots-Irish settlements of Virginia and North Carolina, Chasing The Frontier includes materials from church records, military records, early wills and deeds, and newspapers of the time. For the frontier families, life was a daily test of endurance and hardship, but the Scots-Irish also found time for horseracing, gambling, and socializing, and the migration of this hardy race and the lure of the frontiers of Kentucky and Tennessee led to the founding of churches and state charters, and elections to some of the highest offices in the country. Chasing the Frontier is a snapshot of everyday life for the pioneering Scots-Irish in early America.