Robert Carley's correct in noting the role of the Crown in promoting settlement in Canada in general and the Leeds/Lanark county area in general. Much important fighting in the War of 1812 took place on the Great Lakes, where water transport was essential for trade and travel west. The region around the Thousand Islands & just west had been settled by people from Vermont who were not United Empire Loyalists fleeing the new republic; they were just following the frontier west. Their loyalty to the Crown was suspect and the gov. was very worried about the possibilty that in a future war this might mean the US could cut off supplies and reinforcements to points west. This led to building the Rideau Canal--by Irish laborers, many of them RC-- from what is now Ottawa down to Kingston, to provide a second route around the vulnerable area. In addition, the military was downsized after the end of both the local War of 1812 and the world Napoleonic Wars--and troops demobilized in Canada were offered land to encourage them to settle. There were also various Crown programs to subsidize immigration, which attracted groups from Scotland and Ireland. Meanwhile, the end of the war period made trans-Atlantic travel possible again, allowing the Wexford Protestants, among others, to act on the realization they'd had in 1798 about their future prospects--and various farm produce and cloth prices dropped sharply after the wars as well. These were incentives to leave WEX. As for Why Go to Leeds & Lansdowne & adjacent places... This was the area where land was being awarded to immigrants, for the strategic reasons mentioned, and once some settlers were there, others following went in 'chain migration' where they had kin and friends. Lockwood's chapter "the Chosen People" (pp. 114-172) discusses all this and gives the relevant sources. And not all the land was good farmland--which is why following generations continued to move west. There was certainly such chain migration. The interlocking Gorey/Garrybrit Wesleyan families of WEBSTER, JOHNSTON, LEECH and POOLE that I descend from settled together in Canada, the others apparently following WEBSTERS who emigrated circa 1812, and various of them continued to move in groups to Newboro ON, Gorrie in Huron Co. ON, and finally around 1882 to Balcarres in what is now Saskatchewan--where there were members of all the families (and where some still live.) And re Ellen Rudd's aside re "Why Lockwood"--I don't know him, but I think he did an MA under Donald Akenson of Queen's U, Kingston, a major historian of Irish (especially Protestants) in Canada and elsewhere.) Lockwood has written several histories of communities in the same area; I think he writes somewhere about his own ancestral connections to the area/community. Besides Akenson and Lockwood, Bruce S. Elliott has written a good deal about Irish Protestants in Wexford & environs and in Canada. Carolyn Heald of the Ontario Provincial Archives wrote THE IRISH PALATINES IN ONTARIO: RELIGION, ETHNICITY, AND RURAL MIGRATION (Langdale Press, Gananoque, ON 1994.) While about one specific Methodist group, centred in Limerick, as a good number (including some POOLEs) were on Ram family estates near Gorey and New Ross, and, in my case at least, intermarried with other Methodists, this is a good account of Protestant emigration from Wexford to Ontario. The book as cited is out of print, but it appeared as well (minus the prefaces and index) in vol. IX of CANADIAN PAPERS IN RURAL HISTORY (edited by Akenson), which is still available. Cheers/Greg Finnegan Cambridge MA USA