General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: How did you get here? [View all]Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)I have been able to trace, probably, a few hundred immigrant ancestors; as far as I know only four of them arrived after the Revolution, and most of them arrived before 1700. Most of them left Britain, most of those were English, but they were also Scots, Welsh, Irish...and Dutch, German, and French. My various ancestors include the younger sons of gentry families who set out to make their fortunes in the New World (one ancestor left his sons behind in England to finish their schooling; one of those sons went on to become a founding member of the Royal Society and royal physician to Charles II), Catholics who went off to Maryland with Lord Baltimore, Puritans (including one of the commissioners sent to govern Maryland under Cromwell; he was killed in the Battle of the Severn, called "the last battle of the English Civil War"'; and one of the founders of Hempstead, Long Island, whose great-grandfather was supposedly burned at the stake under Bloody Mary), Quakers who had land grants from William Penn, French Huguenots, Palatine Germans, and (my most recent immigrant ancestors) Irish escaping the famine.