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As you will see below, I have five main geographical areas of genealogical interest, which might be reduced to two because of cultural and historical similarities. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Maine, and Massachusetts can be considered as one area and the South generally, but South Carolina especially, the other.

The New England/Maritime genealogy is united by the fact that all of my ancestors, with the exception of a few later arrivals, were part of the early 17th century Puritan migration to Massachusetts Bay. The maritime connection occurred at two different times and under different circumstances. The first, to Nova Scotia, involved a number of Connecticut families who, having grown beyond the ability of fathers to subdivide their diminishing land holdings any further, took up crown land grants in Nova Scotia after the expulsion of the Acadians around 1760. The second, to New Brunswick, involved the flight of Loyalist ancestors, who moved to the area after the signing of the peace between the new United States and Great Britain in 1783. At the same time, within the United States, southern New Englanders, especially from eastern Massachusetts of which it formed a part, were moving into the then wilderness of Maine to take advantage of its vast resources. So between the end of the hostilities between the French and English and those between the English and Americans in the late 18th century, the maritime provinces of present-day Canada and the province of Maine were being settled by New Englanders and people from some of the other thirteen English colonies on the eastern seabord of North America.

For more than a hundred years, these transplanted families set roots in their new communities, farming, fishing, lumbering, building ships, sailing those ships to near or distant ports in coastal and trans-oceanic trade, and branching out into other occupations and professions. By the end of the 19th century, however, an economic depression fell upon the Maritimes and rural New England, and the descendants of the original emigrants began to turn their eyes toward the bustling cities and mill towns of their great grandparents' former homeland. The immigration of many people from southern and eastern Europe to Boston and New York on the eve of the turn of the century and the flourishing of the industrial revolution meant many new jobs were available in these magnet cities. The building industry especially attracted men who had spent their lives as lumbermen, woodworkers, builders, and the like; and the mills in towns like Lowell or Lawrence, Massachusetts, provided positions for young women from the farms. Clearly, if people wanted to improve their situations, Boston was the place to go, and many families left Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine, and headed south to the Boston area to be near the opportunities occasioned by the new economic boom. In this way, unbeknownst to themselves of course, many old colonial families became reunited in marriage after more than a hundred years of separation. Surely the old shared cultural base facilitated the reassimilation of the returning generation as the political divisions of an earlier generation blurred; and like their forebears, they were willing to uproot and transplant themselves when the opportunity for an improved life presented itself.

A similar drive for improvement and an adventurous and independent spirit linked my Southern and New England ancestors. My mother is the descendant of early 18th century migrants from Pennsylvania and Virginia to the upstate of South Carolina, a great mixture of Germans, Scots-Irish, and English; Quakers, Presbyterians, and Methodists. All of her great grandfathers served in the Confederate Army during the war between the States. All returned to raise families as they struggled through the hardships of the Reconstruction period, never quite recovering from the debacle of their lost cause, and all suffered greatly through the Great Depression of the 1930s. After the war that lifted the nation out of economic depression, my mother made her way to New York City where she met my father, a returned Marine and recent graduate of Purdue University. They were working for the same company and as people do, they found each other, fell in love, and my father took my mother home to Massachusetts to settle down and raise his own family with her. In this way, two different cultures, instead of colliding as they had almost a hundred years earlier, found an affinity for one another and became joined, linking two lines of colonial American history and mirroring what perhaps only a world war was able to accomplish for our often divided nation--the creation of unity and prosperity.