I’m no immigration specialist, but have studied members of my family who, like others from Jefferson County, went to both Michigan and Wisconsin. Completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 and then the Welland Canal four years later -- as Nan Dixon has pointed out -- occurred during depressions following the War of 1812, the most serious in the ‘30s when Nan’s family lost its farm. These events further coincided with glowing reports in eastern newspapers of fertile land available in the Michigan Territory which previously had been poorly advertised because it was branded “poor, barren sandy land” following a cursory survey in 1815. The rest of the story is history. As for emigrants who returned to Jefferson County -- well, those are personal stories but we recall that many Englishmen returned to jolly old England in the 1600s after finding life on the American frontier not all that it was cracked up to be. Tony Sylvester