John, thanks for these notes, esp. the Homer who was indentured for two years in Maryland. The 'big picture' of the migration from Ulster is that most who came arrived at the Middle Atlantic seaports. Some of the popular ports many of us never heard of, like Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Many could not pay their own passage so they came as indentured servants. They would have usually been indentured before leaving Ireland or very soon after arriving since once they got off the ship they tended to disappear. When free, they would have headed for a congenial place to live. If the ancestor manifests with a large family, it would appear that he was better off in Ulster. Ie he probably sold his lease and improvements to raise cash to transport his family. THIS IS A KEY CLUE. If he could raise such cash, he was a larger farmer or merchant. He would show up in records in Ulster. The allusion to the Ulster Custom, above, is important too. In most of Ireland a tenant could be evicted at will and he was not compensated for improvement he made. He could not sell those to another man. In Ulster he could. This is one thing that produced a greater degree of prosperity for the Ulster farmer. Those improvements they sold to raise cash to leave. One reason tenants in the rest of Ireland often didn't leave is they had no cash to leave. If there is a long lease for a larger hunk of land, possibly it is recorded so you have a greater chance of finding information on a family that comes from Ulster in 1770 (or whenver) versus a single man who appears and is indentured. That man probalby left no records in Ireland. He was not the eldest son (or he'd have stayed and inherited) or his family had no land to pass on, even a leasehold. In this case you really want to do your utmost to get some DNA. Also North America was the dumping ground for criminals. Even after the Revolution (when one of the issues was dumping of criminals) the British gov tried to foist a shipload of criminals off on the now free United States. Oddly, no one is descended from them <grin>! The criminals hid their pasts as best they could due to hostility from the locals. Grandpa didn't tell his great grandchildren he was a criminal. So we find that no one has any stories about the immigrants. There is deafening silence. Because someone was holding onto a secret. While many of the London and Bristol transportees are documented and published ("Immigrants in Chains", etc), those from many other places are not. You got two choices: channel the dead or find some DNA matches. Most if not all the published collections of indentures and criminals are indexed in "Filby" and on line now at Ancestry. So you can check them all in about 2 minutes. The cost of a membership that makes this possible is very very low. You can spend a lifetime looking for these sources or pay and do it in a few minutes. Because so often the migrants we know about are Presbyterian farmers with large families, we may not realize this is not the whole story. Our ancestor may have come by himself, possibly as a guest of the Crown, possibly indenturing himself to pay for passage. Most indentured servants were young people and many were young women. The young women were preyed upon by their 'owners' and their sons, so you had out of wedlock children. Unless there was a court case, it can be hard to find these women. When dealing with a young man in a place where there are no families in the tax records about with his surname, consider it is his mother's surname. Especially if it is a place like Maryland and the surname is Irish. I was searching for such a man's roots once. He had ties -- he was later living in Chambersburg where he appears to have been taught the newspaper trade. He married a girl with newspaper family ties, but he never shows up as anyone's heir and he never said a word to anyone about his father. He later moved to Virginia and died young, leaving sons who were apprenticed in the Newspaper industry and who later founded newspaper dynasties out west. But no one knows a thing about this man's father. I suspect the surname is the mother's and she was a servant in a household associated with the newspaper trade in Maryland (where he said he was born). They took care of their own but didn't really want the association known. And in his older life, he didn't pass on their names. DNA might determine the surname of the father. If you end up with a singleton -- DNA might be the best chance you have to discovering who he was and where he came from. The best documentation of early life in the Middle Atlantic colonies and their ports is Dobson's books. Like "Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607-1785". He focuses of course on Scottish migration but he gives good histories of the colony and the ports of arrival as well as alternative places that they could have come from -- like the West Indies. One reason for reduced migration to New England is that few indentured servants were used there. The market was to the south. One exception he notes on p. 83: John SHand who left Aberdeen in 1725 as a servant to Robert Cumming, a Boston merchant, himself probably from Aberdeen. After completing his term, he sailed to Jamaica. Boston had strong trading ties with Jamaica. He worked as a plantation overseer, returning to Boston. There he died in 1738. Dobson says "Intercolony mobility, probably by sea, was a striking feature of the colonial era, a fact which makes many emigrants difficult to track down." YUP! He records another example: Hugh Ross, an Edinburgh lawyer employed as chief clerk by the Scottish Indian and African Coumpany at its colony in Darien. After that colony collapsed he went to New England. Darien was one of several failed Scots colonies in the New World, in this case Panama: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_colonization_of_the_Americas . Dobson discusses these in his books. There was also a large Scots colony in New Jersy. If you think your ancestor was Irish but he was Scots you'll have a very hard time find ing him in Ireland. There were far more Irish migrants than Scottish in the colonies but it is good know where the Scots were and who they are. There were even Scots in New England -- the descendents of Covenantors sold into slavery by Cromwell in the mid 1600s and sent to work on New England factories. They assimilated rapidly into Yankee culture so by the time the Scotch Irish began to arrive in 1718, they were Yankees. Linda Merle