Betty, I seem to be back to receiving only some of the messages posted to the list so if I don't respond you'll know why. I didn't get the one where you asked about migration. About 90% or more migration in the US for the first 200-300 years was from north to south and east to west. Very rarely will you find someone moving the other direction. I have always assumed that people were migrating towards lesser populated areas and therefor more readily available land. Over 90% of the people were farmers back then and were always looking for good cheap(and sometimes free) land. Also it seems that many people back then had an aversion to highly populated areas for whatever reason - just wanted to be left alone I guess. There were several aspects of that trial testimony that were very interesting I thought. One of them was the social "rules" that they lived by. I noticed that a couple of times it was mentioned that whites and blacks socialized much more before the civil war than afterwards when it became practically illegal partly due to the Jim Crow laws. So in that one aspect the war set the country backward in a social sense. I also picked up on something that I had seen before doing genealogy research and that was that many of the former slaves were still living on the property owned by the former "master" and now were tenant farmers. Wonder if their lives were really much different? I knew tenant farmers of both races when I was a child and although they were all technically free, practically speaking they weren't as their choices in life were severally limited. Also it was interesting how people's memories of someone, how they looked and what they did could vary so much. Probably tells you more about the witness than it does about the person they were describing. Bill