Yesterday in a post about Angela’s forced journey from Africa to Jamestown I mentioned that the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Bay just one year later in 1620. From 1620 until 1640 approximately 20,000 people left England and other centres like Leiden in the Netherlands for New England. Unlike places like Jamestown that were founded primarily for economic reasons, New England was settled for religious reasons. Consequently, whereas colonies in Virginia drew young men looking to make it rich—along with slaves to help them—New England saw entire families moving and transplanting parts of towns and England into Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire.
New England kept fantastic records and we know thousands of people. But we do not know whence everyone arrived, but we do know a few thousand. And this mapping project from American Ancestors attempts to capture that information at the English parish level. At its broadest level it is a county-level choropleth that shows, for those for whom we have the information, the majority of the migration, called the Great Migration, came from eastern England, with a few from the southwest.
You can also search for specific people, in which case it brings into focus the county and the parishes within that have more detail. In this case I searched for my ancestor Matthew Allyn, who was one of the founders of Hartford, Connecticut. He came from Braunton in Devon and consequently appears as one of the two people connected to that parish.
Overall, it’s a nice way of combining data visualisation and my interest/hobby of genealogy. The map uses the historical boundaries of parishes prior to 1851, which is important given how boundaries are likely to change over the centuries.
This will be a nice tool for those interested in genealogy and that have ancestors that can be traced back to England. I might be biased, but I really like it.
Credit for the piece goes to Robert Charles Anderson, Giovanni Flammia, Peter H. Van Demark.