I have been assured by a number of people who usually know what they’re talking about, that Jesse James’s forebears hailed from South Armagh.

There are a few cynics too, who would be surprised if this were not so! 

In any case this is the story of Ronald Ban Donaldson, whose forebears certainly did, and whose distant American relations were acquaintances of that same James family.

One can only speculate what might have been the outcome of the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland had not so many Ulster Presbyterians, the backbone of that radical movement the United Irishmen, left our shores in the eighteenth century to find a new life in America. Our previous article demonstrates what a huge effect these pioneering people had on the future history of that emerging nation on the other side of the Atlantic.