Carter and John, Thanks for your interesting insight on causes of migrations and our family origins. We know that these events did not happen in a vacuum. A family is not going to pull up stakes from their ancestral homelands on a whimsey, leaving behind their possessions and extended families, to take a somewhat perilous and costly voyage across an ocean to settle in a strange new world. There had to be major motivating factors for such undertakings. This really came into focus for me when doing my paper on Sir John Pate. Somehow in my mind I had always thought of his life as being remote from the Pate's who came to early colonial Virginia. It just had not registered that they were contemporaries, and the troubles that Sir John was encountering in the turmoils in England were the same that compelled the colonial emigrations. The timeline I prepared really highlights those facts. I am looking forward to the day when our genealogical research makes the leap back across the ocean to connect to those extended families who were left behind in the homelands. Documentation would make the record more complete, with DNA confirming. However, DNA alone can establish family kinships, then perhaps working backwards we can fill in the genealogical gaps. Since my surname is Pate, I have concentrated on that family and not spent a lot of time on other surnames in my lineage. My mother was a Hamilton (mother Faulkner) which I think is Scottish. Ironically, I have a more complete lineage for her Hamilton family and my paternal grandmother Shirey, than I have for the Pate family (brickwall at 1811). A. J. Pate