Let’s Pause To Step Back In Time

Tracking ancestors back through time and place is easier if you know the migration and settlement patterns that affected our ancestors.

Our country’s earliest settlement was in Virginia, along the Tidewater region - a wet, soggy, marshy area good only for certain crops. Soon, the settlers moved northwest into the Piedmont, where the climate was drier, healthier and better for crops.

As immigrants continued to arrive they settled farther and farther inland, migrating through gaps in the Appalachian Mountains into the river valleys - first the Shenandoah, then the Ohio.

Further migration pushed into the great plains of the old Northwest (the present Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota) and then the Midwest. While the Appalachians seem tame today, 17th- and 18th-century immigrants thought them a formidable barrier.

In 1607, Jamestown, Va., became America’s first permanent settlement. The Colonists suffered numerous setbacks and deaths, and stayed only at the convincing of Lord De La Ware. Despite the 1662 massacre, by 1634 they had organized eight shires (counties) along the four major waterways: James, York, Rappahannock and Potomac rivers.

For the first 100 years Colonists spread into the Piedmont’s higher ground, an easier migration with no mountain barriers. As they bumped into the mountains, they tended to turn north or south.

By 1630, Lord Calvert was granted the present state of Maryland. Because it was a Catholic colony, and Virginians tended not to be Catholics, they spread north into the Chesapeake Bay area.

In 1609, Henry Hudson sailed north (up the river later named for him) to near what is now Albany, N.Y., beginning a Dutch settlement; by 1624 they bought Manhattan from the Indians. The Dutch were more interested in such commercial ventures as looking for furs than in colonizing and farming. Their government granted large estates up and down the Hudson to patroons, men who would encourage settlements.

Finns and Swedes sailed into the Delaware River Valley by 1638, even though it was controlled by the Dutch.

The Dutch lost control of their land to the Duke of York by 1662. The English king’s brother received the area as a land grant. New Amsterdam became New York. No vital records exist from the New Amsterdam years, 1606-1662, but microfilmed records of the Dutch Reformed Church are available through the Family History Library.

By 1701, the English system was in place and records as we know them began to be kept.

The pilgrims came in 1621, separating themselves from the Church of England, and slowly spread geographically into Plymouth, Bristol and Barnstable counties. By 1630, the Puritans arrived. They and Separatists did not meld, and, having the much larger colony, the Puritans soon outnumbered and outsettled the pilgrim descendants.

By 1660, the New England Coast was settled and Colonists began spreading up the rivers. Hartford, Wethersfield and Springfield in Connecticut were founded in this period. The northernmost settlement was York, in present-day Maine.

, DataTimes MEMO: This is the first of three articles based on information from Norman Wright.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Donna Potter Phillips The Spokesman-Review