The persistent legend that ministers led their entire congregations to America in the 18th century has some basis, but even in the few documented instances the congregation continued to function so even in those cases ministers took some families, but not all families, from their former congregation. What led a Presbyterian minister to leave his church in Ulster and travel across an ocean? There is ample documentation that he frequently left for the same reasons that convinced a farmer or weaver to pull up stakes. He couldn't support his family where he was because his congregation could not or would not provide the stipend they had agreed on. For many ministers emigration was a personal choice for economic reasons, rather than a solution to broader problems shared by the entire congregation. One might think that all the passengers on the George from Londonderry to Philadelphia in 1769 were led by the Rev. Joseph Rhea, whose name heads the list, but his diary does not give the impression that he even knew any of them. His son recalled years later that a young lady named Frances Dysart, a relative of his mother's, came with them. He does not suggest that there were others. [Billy Kennedy, The Scots-Irish in the Hills of Tennessee (Belfast, 1995), 146-152 has a good account of this family, including the Rev. Joseph Rhea's letter to the Presbytery of Londonderry, resigning as minister at Fahan, Co. Donegal after twenty years "as the congregation has fallen into long arrears and has been very deficient in the original promise to me which was 24 pounds yearly."] The memoir written by his son John Rhea about his family is an eye-opener about a more common factor in emigration, what is often called chain-migration. A surprising number of his relatives (most with different surnames) found their way to America before and after his immediate family emigrated. Far from landing alone and friendless in a strange land, the emigrants from Ulster commonly stayed with a brother-in-law in Philadelphia until they could go to a cousin in Lancaster County or a nephew in Carlisle and later move near to a sister in Washington County or a brother in Tennessee. All the best, Richard