Since the earliest days of settlement to the present day, every region and time period can identify certain trends in the movements of its population. And genealogists wishing to successfully research their ancestors in the highly mobile United States need to have a basic understanding of these migration patterns.

Finding the place or places where our ancestors lived is half the battle in genealogy. After we place a family in a particular location for a certain span of time, it is not uncommon to find that they abruptly disappeared from town records, and we are forced to search for them in a new locale. Sometimes this is as simple as discovering that the place where they lived was formed into a new township from the parent town. In fact, they may never have moved at all. Or, as frequently happened with women, especially in colonial New England, they may have married men from neighboring towns and resettled there.

But what if a quick check of the town histories and published vital records of neighboring towns does not locate your ancestor? Then you may need to learn more about the migration patterns of families, communities, even entire regions—in this case, New England.

In the decade or two preceding the American Revolution, several trends within New England set the scene for post-revolution migration patterns. Among these were a rising sense of individualism, a growing population, greater mobility, and increased speculation in land outside the New England area. By the early eighteenth century, the corporate sense of community so carefully fostered by the Puritan founders was giving way to a growing sense of individualism and self-interest. According to historian Richard Bushman, in From Puritan to Yankee, the seeds of this new individualism had been planted in the older, established communities.

The new frontier communities were no longer paying as much attention to the corporate model of settlement. More and more land was purchased for speculation purposes. In fact, buying wilderness townships was one of the primary ways wealthy merchants invested their excess capital. It was not unusual for a wealthy Boston merchant to own several frontier towns at once. He would hire agents to attract new settlers to his lands. Initially, these frontier towns might only have four or five inhabitants scattered on remote farms. Sometimes it took ten or fifteen years to attract enough families to build a meetinghouse or hire a minister. But, rather than the sense of community that had prevailed in the earliest New England towns, these eighteenth century frontier towns were dominated by a sense of individualism.

After the American Revolution, two distinct types of migration seem to characterize the movement of New Englanders. First, there was a steady generational flow of New Englanders into the nearby states of New York and Pennsylvania, and later into the other regions of the old Northwest Territory. This process of settlement frequently took families fifty to seventy-five years and two or three generations to move from a given area such as Vermont to Illinois. The second type of migration occurred in sudden, massive spurts, often described as fevers: "Genesee Fever" in the mid-1790s; "Ohio Fever" after 1816; and "Oregon Fever" in the 1840s; and the California Gold Rush. When these fevers swept New England, families who had lived in one place for several generations might suddenly pull up stakes and leave for distant lands in the west.

Hundreds of New England families began to move into the northeastern counties of Pennsylvania after the Revolution, as well as the northern and west-central counties of New York. In fact, even before the Revolution, Connecticut men had established settlements in Pennsylvania just east of the Susquehanna River in northern Pennsylvania and on a tract along the Delaware River. Other New Englanders settled in the northern counties of Tioga, Bradford, and Susquehanna. From there they moved into Erie and Crawford. Even Abraham Lincoln’s ancestors, who originated in Hingham, Massachusetts, settled briefly in Pennsylvania.

In the 1790s, many New Englanders began moving to that region of New York known as the Genesee country. Located in west-central New York, the area contained over two million acres, which were ceded to Massachusetts in 1786 to settle an ancient land dispute. Massachusetts then sold this land to Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham for $100,000. Phelps and Gorham divided it into townships and began offering parcels to individuals in 160-acre tracts.

The first migration fever, the so-called "Genesee Fever," quickly spread throughout New England. According to Stewart H. Holbrook in The Yankee Exodus, "One winter’s day in 1795 an observer [in Albany, NY] counted 500 sleighs passing westward through that town between sunrise and sunset. During the following summer an average of twenty boats daily went up the Mohawk River." Holbrook adds that advertisements appealed to the industrious yeomanry of Vermont and New Hampshire who wished for farms not lying edgeways. The Genesee country was rapidly transformed into a little New England commonwealth.

Settlements along the Ohio River did not, however, attract many New Englanders. They moved instead to an area in Ohio called the "Western Reserve," known in New England as New Connecticut. The Western Reserve is a narrow strip of land running west from the Pennsylvania border and paralleling Lake Erie, which the state of Connecticut withheld when all lands west of the Appalachian Mountains were turned over to the federal government. In 1795, Connecticut sold most of this land, approximately 3 million acres, to the Connecticut Land Company.

In 1800 the entire population on the Reserve was only 1,302. In his book The Western Reserve: The Story of New Connecticut in Ohio, Harlan Hatcher captures the sense of isolation on the Reserve. He writes, "We sweep our eyes over the 3 million acres, across the 120-mile stretch of wilderness; we see these few hundred families set down miles apart in little oases hacked out of the woods in the scattered townships, isolated, lonely, trying in many instances desperately to keep alive and advance the station of themselves and their children."

New Englanders began moving to the Reserve in massive numbers only after the War of 1812, which had had a devastating economic effect on New England. The British had raided and sacked towns along the coast and held American ships in harbor. Foreign trade was ruined. New England was virtually bankrupt.

Compounding the problems brought on by war was the fierce winter of 1816, the coldest in New England history. There were severe frosts even in June, July, and August. Every crop was affected and many people were reduced to begging. The following winter was exceptionally cold as well. For many New Englanders, these cold winters were the final straw. The following spring, a mass movement of New Englanders to the Western Reserve began in earnest; "Ohio Fever" swept across New England. As Hatcher notes, "It was one of the largest and most homogeneous mass migrations in American history."

Even as people were moving to Ohio, others were beginning to look beyond to more distant territories in the Old Northwest. New Englanders were attracted especially to Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. And beyond the Mississippi River, several thousand New Englanders also settled in Iowa.

By the 1850s the exodus from New England had reached such proportions that some began to fear the total abandonment of the region. One New England newspaper editor lamented in 1857 that "more than 300,000 people of New England will leave" for the West. In Maine, a newspaperman who saw young Mainers leaving almost daily worried that the great exodus was "taking from us the most vital elements of progress and our future good condition" (Holbrook, 74).

But the young men and women of New England found it almost impossible to resist the handsome posters and massive advertising campaigns being mounted by newly organized midwest railroad companies. The Illinois Central, chartered in 1851, was trying to sell 2,295,000 acres of land it had been given by the Illinois legislature. One of its advertisements read, "Look, ye sons and daughters of New England, look at what a farm can be in Eden. Come up out of your terminal moraines, which you foolishly call farms. Here in Illinois the life of the husbandman is fed by the bounty of the earth and sweetened by the air of heaven."

The Erie Canal, which was opened in 1825, became the great highway from New England to the West. Manifests of canal boats in the 1830s often read, "Flour, wool, and hides eastbound, farmers westbound." In one month, four thousand farm families passed through the canal. Then, arriving in Buffalo, they boarded vessels to cross Lake Erie to Cleveland, Toledo, or Detroit then westward overland to Michigan, Wisconsin, or across the Mississippi into Iowa or points farther west.

With so many families heading west, it was a time of sadness for those who were left behind. One citizen in Candia, New Hampshire lamented, "there are now not over eight persons who live upon lands which were owned and occupied by their ancestors previous to the year 1800" (Holbrook, 83).

Emigrants who took the overland trail to California and Oregon were, for the most part, well prepared. Most were men and women who had moved before. The trip overland was expensive. It cost between $500 and $1,000 to travel with a family from the Missouri River to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Then there was the additional expense of getting to one of the jumping-off points on the Missouri River. Financing the trip usually required selling land and household goods in New England and might require borrowing from relatives as well.

The Oregon Fever was fueled in part by the depression of 1837, which caused the closing of many banks throughout the country. By 1839 wages had fallen thirty to fifty percent, and 200,000 people in New York City alone wondered how they would get through the winter. Horace Greeley advised the unemployed young men to go west. Many did.

Oregon Fever was also stimulated by the optimistic reports of rich farmland and mild climate. One such report stated the "soil of the valley is rich beyond comparison." In 1843 the Ohio Statesmen wrote that "Oregon fever is raging in almost every part of the Union."

The trip across the Oregon Trail was frequently tragic. One woman, Catherine Sager, recalled that her father Henry was a restless man who had migrated from Ohio to Missouri in 1838, and in 1844 decided to move his family to Oregon. "Not being accustomed to riding in a covered wagon," Catherine wrote, "the motion made us all sick, and the uncomfortableness of the situation was increased from the fact that it had set into rain, which made it impossible to roll back and let in the fresh air. It also caused a damp and musty smell that was very nauseating." It took several weeks of travel to overcome this sickness.

Soon these uncomfortable conditions took a serious turn for the worse. One day the team of oxen ran up the side of an embankment, overturning the wagon and almost killing Catherine’s mother. Later Catherine’s dress got caught on an axe handle, which somehow thrust her under the wheels of the wagon, crushing her left leg. Just outside Fort Laramie, the family was caught in a buffalo stampede, and in trying to turn the buffalo away from the wagon, Henry Sager lost his life. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Sager tried to continue alone with her children, but in the Utah territory, "she was afflicted with the sore mouth [cholera], soon became delirious," and died. The orphaned children continued with the wagon train to Oregon. Finally, in a particularly horrible ending, some of the Sager children were given shelter by the missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, and with them were massacred by Indians in 1847.

In 1849, boats were bound for San Francisco from every port imaginable. The New England Historic Genealogical Society has a notebook of newspaper clippings noting departures for San Francisco from just about any place on the New England coast with a dock large enough to handle seaworthy vessels. Of the 275 ships that landed at San Francisco in 1849, 121 were from New England. In the 1850 census, 11,736 (or seventeen percent) of native-born Americans recorded origins from New England. And many more who gave Ohio or New York as their state of birth may have been from a family with New England roots.

Two distinctive types of migration characterized the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first occurred in progressive stages and was really an extension of generational migration in the colonial period. Families moved literally step by step from, perhaps, Connecticut to New Hampshire to Vermont, then westward to New York or Pennsylvania, then Ohio, the Midwest, and sometimes, California and Oregon. The second pattern was Genesee, Ohio, Oregon, and California Gold Rush "fevers," which suddenly swept over New England, often stimulated by economic and climatic factors as well as the pioneering spirit and search for a better life that have since characterized Americans. Whichever way New Englanders migrated after the Revolution, they were a westward-minded, restless, and migrating people whose pathways have influenced the entire movement of the United States population.

Bushman, Richard L., From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1980, 1967.

Coddington, John Insley, "Patterns of Migration in the Colonial Period" and "Patterns of Post-Revolutionary Migration," Hoosier Genealogist 9 (1969): 1-6; 13-17.

Hatcher, Harlan H., The Western Reserve: The Story of New Connecticut in Ohio. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1949.

Holbrook, Stewart H., The Yankee Exodus: An Account of Migration from New England. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1950.

Kulakoff, Allan, "Migration and Cultural Diffusion in Early America, 1600-1860," Historical Methods 19 (Fall 1986): 153-69.

Rosenberry, Lois Kimball Mathews, The Expansion of New England: The Spread of New England Settlements and Institutions to the Mississippi River, 1620-1865. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909.

Stilwell, Lewis D., Migration from Vermont. Montpelier, Vermont: Vermont Historical Society, 1948.