This week I
found a slim but very helpful book by the famous genealogist, William
Dollarhide.
Dollarhide, William. British
Origins of American Colonists, 1629-1775. Bountiful, Utah: Heritage Quest
Genealogical Services, division of AGLL, Inc., 1998. ISBN 1-877677-69-8
He suggests “if
an American today has a British ancestor who arrived during the colonial
period, there is a very high chance that he was part of one of these four waves
of migrations.”
·
From
East Anglia came the Puritans to New
England during the Great Migration, 1629 to 1640.
·
From
the West Country came the cavaliers
and their servants to the Chesapeake, 1641 to 1675.
·
Quakers
from the North Midlands came to the Delaware
Valley, 1675 to 1715.
·
People
from the English-Scottish borderlands
came to the rural areas of the colonies 1717 to 1775.
If you know where your colonial ancestor lived in America, you can
begin to pinpoint where he came from in Britain.
During the
Great Migration about 21,000 Puritans came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Although they came from all counties in England, over half came from East
Anglia; Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex plus Cambridge, Hertford, Huntington, Lincoln
and parts of Bedford and Kent.
Another
group of Puritans came from the west of England where the counties of Dorset,
Somerset and Wiltshire meet. Their beliefs were less strict and their customs
different from the East Anglicans so they moved on to Connecticut, Maine and
the Island of Nantucket once on this continent.
If you check
my post on 2 Oct 2013, you will find information from a book by J.R. Smith about
American connections in Essex, England including John Winthrop and William
Pynchon, Puritans in New England, but he also highlights other Essex men in the
Delaware Valley and Virginia. For example, William Penn was born in Wanstead,
Essex.
Next post:
Details of the Quakers and other groups of British colonists who went to
specific places in America.
