Dear List, I thought this exchange about Boyd migration patterns in the U.S. might be of interest to the list. Those of you who have a greater knowledge of this dimension of Boyd genealogy are most welcome to comment. As background for this, I should mention that my Boyds turned up near Toronto, Ontario, Canada between 1820 and 1825 and so we spent years looking at migration routes across Canada and along the border in the United States. But our radar recently swung radically to the south as the result of a Y-DNA test of a Boyd from Missouri that matches our Boyds perfectly. Larry Hugh Boyd Tempe, Arizona Hi Gordon, Indeed, your observation about a "New Tennessee in Missouri" being a reflection of early migration patterns is interesting and relevant to our current research. My recollection of what I had read about the big Scots-Irish immigrations that would apply to our Boyd research is that there was a great flow in the mid-1700's to the colonies and a great pressure to expand to the west. However, by the Proclamation of 1763, the British effectively blocked migration to the west by setting the western boundary for westward expansion at the Appalachian Mountains - the other side of which they could not or would not provide protection. Consequently, new settlers were bottled up with only one direction to expand, which was to the south. Consequently, there was a great migration to states like Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, which is why so many town names are Scottish-Irish and why we find so many Boyds in those states. It also explains why the largest Scottish Library in the country is located at the small city of Moultrie, Georgia. The pent up migration exploded westward after the War of Independence and the Treaty of Paris (1783), the latter of which ceded formally British Territory westward to the Mississippi and opened up Louisiana to the south and west after the Louisiana Purchase of 1804. Of course, the Louis and Clark Expeditions further opened the West. I don't know the actually topology and the trails, but if you look at a map, you can visualize a large direct corridor between South Carolina and Georgia on the coast to Tennessee to Missouri, as you inferred from the existence of a "New Tennessee" in Missouri. One can also visualize something of a parallel corridor between North Carolina to Kentucky to Indiana and Illinois. Thus, I think we can talk about two major and quite distinct migration periods of Boyds. The first to the colonies and to the south in the mid to late 1700's and the second to the middle west and in the first quarter of the 18th century. (A third great migration in the mid-1800's was triggered by the great potatoes famine in Ireland and came more or less directly across through New York State, Pennsylvania and Ohio.) Because of the time frame and the DNA match with a Boyd in Missouri, we are looking into the possibility that one branch of the Boyds connected to our Boyds came over in the first migration and that our Boyds came over in the second wave and that they probably located first in places where kin were or had settled earlier. One such scenario is that our Ontario Boyds came to SC, NC, or VA in the latter part of the second great migration (1815 to 1825) and may have followed earlier relatives to Tennessee and then Missouri, but instead of going further west, they went north (by northeast) to Ontario, Canada. Perhaps they were influenced by Ontario's efforts to attract people through land grants and such. Because I simply assumed that if the Boyds migrated to Canada by way of the United States, they would have followed the path along the Erie Canal and the south shore of lake Ontario (NY and PA), we spent many a moon searching those areas without success. Our current focus is on the south to middle west migration of Scottish-Irish and it is the above framework that is at least implicit in our new efforts to track the Boyds of Ontario. The irony is that years ago we scanned the south and middle west for our Boyds, but it is quite natural that without some reason for expecting to find them there,! one does not look very close and can easily miss important clues. Discovering a virtually perfect Boyd DNA match on 27 markers in Missouri certainly gave us a reason to swing the spotlight in that direction. Larry