As one Twitter user put it, "Obama being ~more~ Irish than Vance is hilarious." Yes, it would be. And maybe Vance does have Scotch-Irish ancestry, as he claims. But researchers going through extensive records back to the mid-1600s just couldn't find any evidence of that.

Source: The Times

JD Vance takes pride in declaring himself to be a “Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart” but a trawl of genealogy records has found no evidence linking the US vice-president to Ireland.

In an attempt to link Vance to Ulster, a DUP minister commissioned researchers to dig into the ancestral past of the controversial Republican Party politician.

A glossy 24-page dossier titled “The Family Footsteps of JD Vance” was produced, but researchers admitted they had “not established a conclusive family link” to Northern Ireland.

Gordon Lyons, the Northern Ireland minister for communities, had been ­hoping to present a copy of the report personally to Vance over the St Patrick’s Day period in Washington DC.

President Trump’s right-hand man has long claimed to have Celtic links, writing in his bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy: “To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish ­hillbilly at heart.”

Unfortunately, despite six months of inquiry, no link could be found.

Emails obtained via a freedom of information request show that in February Lyons’s office was advised that “it has not been possible to establish conclusive proof of a direct Vance link back to Ulster at this stage”.

He noted that inquiries were continuing in the US but that the researcher had “run into the proverbial brick wall” and amid continuing work there was “no guarantee” of success.

Vance made his Scots-Irish lineage the basis for his best-selling Hillbilly Elegy.

"Two generations ago my grandparents were dirt-poor and in love. They got married and moved north to Ohio from the Appalachian hills of eastern Kentucky in the hope of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. Their grandchild (me) graduated from one of the finest educational institutions in the world, Yale Law School. But to understand me, you must understand thatI am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.

“I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition — their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and mill workers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family.

Now, it turns out that the basis for his book may not be based on fact but on fantasy.