I have inserted a very long post of an overview of one part of my genealogy back to March 1st. I didn't want to take up my whole main page, and I figured only a small percentage of people would be interested. It is not a list of ancestors but a general commentary of an entire group that pretty much extends in a solid block back to the Great Migration of puritans to New England in a very brief period in the early 17th C.I am mostly posting it for reference.
Come to think of it, my Swedish line is much shorter and I should likely post that, too. That would be two of four grandparents.
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My paternal grandmother typed out a copious family history- over a hundred pages. My sister-in-law added to it- with some corrections. My family tree covers all four cultures in Albion's seed- Scots-Irish, Cavalier (if not Cav at least in Va in 1635, but Cav enough to own land.But I suspect some indentured servants in the lineage.), Quaker, and Puritan. The Puritan part of the family dissented from the dissenters and turned Quaker. Soon after the founding of the Pennsylvania colony, the Massachusetts Quaker branch of my family left Massachusetts for Pennsylvania. Perhaps I should tell my Massachusetts born-and-bred sister-in-law that the family motto was, "We're from Massachusetts, but got out as soon as we could."
Coupled with additional Swiss, Dutch, and German ancestry, I am a fairly representative mixture of what was in the US in 1750- or 1850. Which helps explain why through the years, I have fairly often been mistaken for someone else- even in my hometown. I call it a 50th percentile face.
The interesting parts of my family history are mostly-known to me. (Though if I dig deep enough, I might find the court records of one of a divorce involving a great-grand-father, and possibly figure out whether the story was told to me accurately...)
But it's information, and details that I can run down, shake out, and organize myself.
I'm a little surprised at how large the 1620-to-1640-era of migration was, and how it shrunk after that point.
I think I have two branches of family that reach back that far, one of which does connect to a passenger of the Mayflower. My thought is that any family which reaches back to the 17th-Century New England most likely intermarried with a descendant of the Mayflower passengers at least once.
At least one of those branches of the family traveled from New England to Ohio during the first wave of migration West-wards. It looks like there was some pent-up desire to move into Ohio valley between the time of the French and Indian War and the close of the Revolutionary War. Shortly after the end of the Revolutionary War, huge numbers of settlers lit out for what was then known as the Northwest Territory. By 1803, that territory had been subdivided several times, and the State of Ohio had already been created and admitted to the Union.
@ SJ - read up on that last part. You have hit it just about right. Whole towns in Vermont emptied, less so but also in NH, MA, Maine, and CT as well. New England learned that farmland in Ohio and Indiana didn't have rocks, and so packed everything in carts to head west. There are towns in VT and western NH that did not get back up to 1840-level population until the 1990s. It would have been even quicker if there hadn't been money to be made from wool for about 40 years. One of my ancestor families was born in VT but died in Ashtabula. I'm descended from one of the two (of five) brothers who inherited the farm and stayed.
Intermarriage with Mayflower. Again, by intuition alone you have it about right. You sniff this out well. I read years ago that if you count not just the Mayflower, but all the ships before 1625 (when it really ramped up), you could find an ancestor to over 75% of all English-surnamed people in America. Last night I hit an Abraham Lincoln ancestor I didn't know what there, and earlier this week hit a Delano. Robert Frost and Ralph Waldo Emerson were revealed as distant cousins the week before that. The interrelationship is impressive. In the first 80 years, New England women had one of the highest sustained fertility rates ever recorded, almost nine children per woman.
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