The Ulster-American Folk Park, in Omagh, Northern Ireland, an outdoor museum, tells the story of emigration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Old World and New World layout illustrates the various aspects of emigrant life on both sides of the Atlantic. Emigration from Ireland to America - a brief historical background Large-scale emigration from Ireland to North America began in the 1720s and throughout the remainder of the eighteenth century involved many thousands of settlers, mainly from Ulster, who sought land and a new way of life on the Appalachian frontier.