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Originally Posted by someone123
My impression is that before the US started to implement stricter immigration controls around the early 1900's, there was a window of time when it was common for immigrants to bounce around North America. Plus there were professionals who moved around starting later in the 19th century.
Back in the time before railways and steamships however people stayed put a lot more. The towns in the 1700's tended to be populated by families that came on specific ships and that was it. The price of travel was so high that some people agreed to become indentured servants for years in exchange for passage across the Atlantic. Most towns in Nova Scotia have specific founding ships or events. For example, Pictou was settled by Highland Scots who came on the ship Hector in 1773 and you can visit the replica ship there. Truro was founded by a group of Ulster Scots in 1761. Dartmouth settlers came on the Alderney and that's why there's an Alderney Landing there. It's very common for people doing genealogy research in NS to look up the ship their ancestors came on.
The New England Planters are interesting too. They moved to Nova Scotia in the 1750's, mostly settling the Annapolis Valley after the expulsion of the Acadians. They didn't turn into revolutionaries a couple of decades later and they weren't big fans of the Loyalists. In the 1700's at least there doesn't seem to have been much sense of American solidarity. I suspect that if you spoke to them about the 13 colonies being a "mother country" the whole idea would have made no sense to them whatsoever. They merely moved from one isolated coastal town to another, and some of them were already recent settlers from Britain. There wasn't even much sense of nation states back then. The main identities were Catholic and Protestant. Like I've pointed out before, Britain appointed a Francophone governor to Nova Scotia in 1740. He was considered a good choice because he was bilingual and a Huguenot.
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Definitely. The one that surprises me most is Michigan. I have a lot of distant relatives who ended up there.
I already knew about Nova Scotia, Boston, and Montreal. But had NO idea anyone related to me ended up in Michigan.
These were my ancestors by 1875:
