The
Great Migration
The
goal of the Great Migration Study Project is to create comprehensive
biographical and genealogical accounts of all immigrants to
New England from 1620 to 1643, from the arrival of the Mayflower
to the decline of immigration resulting from the beginning of
the Civil War in England. The Project was conceived by Robert
Charles Anderson and was proposed to the New England Historic
Genealogical Society early in 1988. Anderson and the Society
quickly reached an agreement and the Project officially began
on 15 November 1988.
The major,
comprehensive surveys of immigrants to New England were published
in the last third of the nineteenth century or the first third
of the twentieth century: Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary
of the First Settlers of New England (1860-1862); Austin’s
Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island (1887); Pope’s
Pioneers of Massachusetts (1900); Noyes, Libby and
Davis’s Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire
(1928-1939). All of these compendia remain valuable resources
and will continue so for many years. They have, however, been
superseded in many places by the last century and more of published
genealogical research.
For each
immigrant to New England, whether an unattached individual or
a family group, our approach is to survey the most important
compiled accounts of the immigrant, whether in the survey sources
noted above, in separate monographs or in the periodical literature.
These accounts are then checked against a wide range of original
source material, including vital records, church records, deeds,
probate records, court records, and a variety of other types
of documents. All of this material is then examined and cross-correlated,
with special attention to discrepancies between sources, whether
primary or secondary. The final goal is a comprehensive account
of the individual which synthesizes what is known at the date
of publication and will serve as a solid foundation for future
research.
The entire
time period of the Great Migration has been divided into smaller
chronological chunks, within which range of years the sketches
are published in alphabetic order. The first series of volumes
covered the immigrants who arrived in the years from 1620 through
1633. The three volumes of this first series, The Great
Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633,
published in 1995, contained more than nine hundred sketches.
(Although these three volumes cover two-thirds of the time period
under investigation, they only contain about one-sixth of the
total number of immigrants. Beginning in 1634 and running until
the end of that decade the annual rate of migration became much
higher.)
The second
series of volumes covers those who arrived in 1634 and 1635
and bears the title The Great Migration: Immigrants to New
England, 1634-1635. To date four volumes in this series
have appeared: A and B (1999); C through F (2001); G and
H (2003); and I through L (2005). For the first two of these four volumes, Anderson
was joined as author by George F. Sanborn Jr. and Melinde Lutz
Sanborn. Three more volumes will be required to complete this
series.
In 2004
a portion of the first series was revisited, by extracting about
two hundred sketches of those who had resided in those earliest
years in Plymouth Colony. The sketches were updated, to take
into account the wide range of new research in this area since
1995, and were also revised, correcting those errors that had
been discovered in the original research and also upgrading
the sketches with some material not included in the original
version. The resulting volume is The Pilgrim Migration:
Immigrants to Plymouth Colony, 1620-1633.
In 1990
the Great Migration Study Project commenced publication of the
quarterly Great Migration Newsletter, which in 2005
enters its fourteenth volume. Each issue of the Newsletter
includes as its centerpiece a lengthy Focus article, which examines
closely one of the early New England towns or an important set
of early records. The Newsletter also includes shorter
articles, editorial commentary and a Recent Literature section,
which surveys current monographic and periodical literature
relating to the Great Migration and its immigrants.
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