The family of John Franklin Moore were of Scotch-Irish descent.

When Elizabeth I came to the throne in England, she rewarded the knights and soldiers in her court for their military service to the throne by granting them estates in Ireland.

The Celtic Irish already there questioned her right to these lands seeing that they had been held by their families since Roman days when the Gauls arrived in what would become the British Isles.

From the time of St. Patrick, these Gaelic Irish were of Roman Catholic persuasion.

They were primitive farmers and Ireland's technology lagged behind that of the Britons to the south  --  the Celtic settlers who had occupied the land that would become Great Britain.

The Gauls who had settled this larger, eastern-most island spoke a variant of the Celtic tongue called Brythunic and gave the name, Britons, to these folks.

As for the Gauls who entered Ireland, they called themselves "Erie," and were known to the Romans as the "Scotti."  They spoke a variant of the Celtic tongue known as "Gaelic."

When the "Scotti" migrated back across the Irish Sea to the northern highlands of Great Britain, they gave the name "Scots" to these highlanders and changed the name of these northern provinces from Caledonia to Scotland.

Church-wise, the British and the Scots were both of Protestant persuasion -- the British being Anglican and belonging to the Church of England established by Elizabeth's father, King Henry VIII, when he broke with the Pope of Rome while Scotland was Presbyterian following the precepts of John Calvin and John Knox.

These nobles and knights who Queen Elizabeth I had chosen to reward with Irish holdings took with them artisans and skilled craftsmen from England and Scotland in an attempt to modernize the Irish economy and culture.

These folk became known as the Scotch-Irish. 

Their migration set up a competition between the Scotch-Irish and the native Irish that exists until this day.

The Gaelic Irish claimed that the British and the Scot immigrants were given superior positions in the new Irish industries while they were considered primitive and relegated to an inferior status as farmers.

The first of the five wives of King Henry VIII was Catherine of Aragon, both the daughter of King Philip of Spain and the widow of Henry' older brother, James, who had died while still the heir apparent to the throne.

Henry had a son by a later wife who succeeded his father to the throne while yet a boy and who died while still a youth.  He was succeeded by his half-sister, Mary, daughter of Catherine and a Roman Catholic by birth.

Upon ascending to the throne, she reverted to the loyalty of the Pope resulting in death and persecution for many in England of the Protestant persuasion thereby gaining for herself the sobriquet of "Bloody Mary."

Mary too succumbed after just a few years on the throne and was succeeded by her half-sister, Elizabeth  --  daughter of Henry VIII and Anne of Boleyn.

She returned England to an Anglican loyalty, and like here father became head of the English church.

With each of these religious changes, some of those out of favor abandoned the British Isles  --  sometimes Great Britain, sometimes Ireland and sometimes Scotland.  Many of these migrated to the American colonies.

One such person was a Scotch-Irish fellow named John Moore, who arrived in Rutherford County, North Carolina shortly before the Revolutionary War.

He was described as a "tall man with tall sons"  --  traits which mark the Moore family to this day.

These waves of immigration are what is known today as the Scotch-Irish movement and are not to be confused with the later wave of Irish immigration related to the potato blight.

The potato, which made its way from South America to Spain and then to Ireland, was a "complete" diet and has been credited by historians with providing Europe with the caloric intake necessary to support the Industrial Revolution. 

Ireland proved adept in the cultivation of this root whereby comes today's preference for "Irish Potatoes."

In the late 1800's the Irish potato crop was struck by blight and the resultant famine led to mass starvation and mass migration. 

The arrival of these Irish immigrants was a full century after the earlier Scotch-Irish migration.

These later immigrants were the Irish who forever changed the character of Boston while the earlier Scotch-Irish migration had primarily been to the south.

THE EARLY MOORE GENERATIONS

The Scotch-Irish immigrant, John Moore, married a woman by the name of Eliza Jane, her maiden surname now lost to memory.

Among their children were a bevy of "tall" daughters and two sons, Thomas and George  --  both of whom would be Edie's great, great grandfathers.

Thomas married Mary McSwaim and their daughter, Cynthia Ann Moore, would marry Gold Griffin Holland and they would have a daughter, Cynthia Susan Holland.

George, on the other hand, married a Mary Roberts and they too had a son also named Thomas.  He would marry Millie Morrow and their son was named John Franklin Moore.

In another "shaggy dog" aside, Millie Morrow was supposedly related to Ann Morrow Lindberg, wife of the famous aviator.

Anyway, Millie Morrow's son John Franklin Moore, the grandson of George Moore, would eventually move to Boiling Springs and there marry Cynthia Susan Holland, granddaughter of Thomas Moore and daughter of Gold Griffin Holland and Cynthia Ann Moore.

Thus we can see that the lineage pf the Moores and the Hollands on Edie's maternal side is as convoluted and intermarried as the Hamricks on her paternal side.

Next chapter    Chapter 13, John Franklin and Cynthia Susam (Holland) Moore

Previous chapter    Chapter 11, Across the Cross-Roads from the Hamricks

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