Hi Bill Ah yes the meat and potatoes are the best. I like the "push and pull factors" description. It seems to me that the quest for land and freedom from religious persecution have been two prime factors in migration. Here in North America we tend to think of the Mayflower pilgrims when we think of freedom of religion. Oddly my ancestors (Howlands) in Mass. turned to the Quaker religion and were treated harshly. It seemed that some of them migrated to R.I. where they had more freedoms. Odd how the pilgrims became the ones to squash religious freedom. It goes without saying that war is added to the mix. One has to wonder what New Brunswick would look like today without the massive Loyalist migration. I'm sure it would be a very different province than what we see today. If we look at migration as it is today we see nothing has changed except the ease of movement. We have to marvel at our ancestors for the hardships they endured trying to find a better way of life. Hi Ruth, I call the names n' dates the family skeleton. Learning about who they were is the meat n' potatoes. I went back to university after 25 years & took all my credits in history and did much better than I did in high school. Why? I was now interested. Even up to the 1980s, it was hard to figure out where someone had come from and I came up the idea of chain migration, although the name didn't cross my mind - just the concept. In 1982, I met Dr. Bruce Elliott (history) whose thesis had just been published and he, too, had found and used chain migration patterns to find people. A social historian, he looked too at people bringing with them customs and the way to do things. For instance, the style of a man's house might as well have been a flag on the roof. I took a few courses given by him & he put into words what I had also considered. Why did they leave (must have been daunting) and why did they go where they did? Bruce called it "push" and "pull" factors. In the "Push" factors are such things as economy and religion. Where they went was often because a relative/neighbour was doing better there & frequently, especially in early years, they followed the trade routes. There's a cute story about the young Irishman who crossed America to Oregon. After a couple of months on the very hot midwestern high plains, the wagon train reached the Rockies. He wrote back to his brother and said: "Paddy, you godda come here. They have so much land [that] they're stackin' it." Good luck with your search. And read local histories of places where your people lived. Bill