J. Paul Hawthorne started a bit of a phenomenon, whether he meant to or not, earlier this week on Facebook, when he created a migration map of his own ancestors using Excel to reflect his pedigree chart.
You can view Paul’s chart here.
Wanting to do something similar, I created two separate charts, one for my mother’s side and one for my father’s side, one underneath the other. My father’s pedigree, from Appalachia, is on the top.
I’ve also included birth years in addition to the birth locations. I think that gives a time perspective to a very visible migration path. It was also interesting to note the range of birth years in the oldest generation, from 1759 to 1823.
On my father’s side, you can visibly see the westward migration from Virginia and North Carolina into Tennessee and eventually, in the 19-teens into Indiana as tenant farmers. Had that not happened, my parents would never had met.
My mother’s side is generally much more immediately European – although not exclusively so, as her Connecticut line reaches back to the Mayflower.
The cells labeled “New England” are my Acadian ancestors after the deportation and that is what subsequent church records show as their birth location. Given the history of the people and location where they settled in Canada, they were likely born in Massachusetts, but we don’t know for sure. Before that, they were from Canada, a mixture of French and Native American dating from the early 1600s.
We Americans really are a melting pot. My ancestors 5 generations ago were born in 8 different states (counting New England as Massachusetts) and different locations in three foreign countries. The New England group subsequently moved TO a foreign country FROM the US, only to move back again a generation later and request citizenship. That’s a bit unusual.
I’ve added percentages above the various columns. That is the approximate percentage of the DNA of the individual ancestors in that column that I carry. If you look at the column furthest to the right, I carry 3.125% of each of those ancestors, on average. When we think about autosomally matching other descendants of those ancestors who also carry perhaps 3.125%, it’s amazing that we match common segments at all, but we often do.
These percentages are also relevant to ethnicity. For example, my one English ancestor is a bit deceiving, because all of those Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina ancestors had to come from someplace. As I work those lines backwards in time, I can place many of them in British Isles locations and confirm it with various kinds of DNA matching. For example, my Campbell male cousins have Y DNA tested and we are confirmed matches to the Campbell Clan in Scotland, my Estes’s to the Kent, England Eastes line, and so forth.
In many cases, I know more than is displayed on these charts. For example, on my mother’s charts, I know that both the Maryland and Pennsylvania families are entirely German, so while their birth location was in the US, their heritage isn’t reflected here.
Just the same, if you’re looking at migration patterns and origins for more recent immigrants, this provides a fun way to take a look at your family history. It’s also a nice, visual way to engage children and young people in both history and family history. If you look at migration patterns and begin to ask questions like why and what would have prompted that migration at that place and time in history, you’ve begun to engage in the same kinds of thoughts and decisions as those ancestors as they pondered moving on to the next destination.
What stories does your migration pedigree chart tell you about your family?
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