However, multiple historians have noted that from the time of the American Revolutionary War until 1850, the term largely fell out of usage, because most Ulster Protestants self-identified as "Irish" until large waves of immigration by Irish Catholics both during and after the 1840s Great Famine in Ireland led those Ulster Protestants in America who lived in proximity to the new immigrants to change their self-identification from "Irish" to "Scotch-Irish," while those Ulster Protestants who did not live in proximity to Irish Catholics continued to self-identify as "Irish," or as time went on, to start self-identifying as being of "American ancestry."