Directory Of Scottish Settlers In North America 1625 1825

Seven volumes of lists of Scottish immigrants to North America between 1625 and 1825.

Before 1650, only a few hundred Scots had trickled into the American colonies, but by the early 1770s the number had risen to 10,000 per year. A conservative estimate of the total number of Scots who settled in North America prior to 1785 is around 150,000. Who were these Scots? What did they do? Where did they settle? What factors motivated their emigration? Dobson's work, based on original research on both sides of the Atlantic, comprehensively identifies the Scottish contribution to the settlement of North America prior to 1785, with particular emphasis on the seventeenth century.

The great 18th-century Scottish immigration to the Carolinas was a response, in large part, to the failure of the Jacobite rebellion in 1715, a phenomenon which set in motion a chain emigration of Scottish Lowlanders, followed by one of Highlanders. Publication of David Dobson's Directory of Scots in the Carolinas, 1680-1830, Volume 1 in 1986 was the first attempt to build a comprehensive list of Scottish settlers in that region. Since 1986, Mr. Dobson has gathered an overwhelming amount of new information on early Scottish immigrants to North and South Carolina based on his research in Scotland, England, and the U.S., but especially at the National Archives in Scotland. This sequel to the 1986 volume encases those findings. In all, the compiler has found evidence on nearly 1,000 Scots not mentioned in the original work and, for the most part, not found in his other publications on Scottish emigration. As one might expect from such a disparate body of sources, the descriptions of these Scots vary considerably, though there is a solid foundation of genealogical detail: age, place and date of birth, and often names of parents, names of spouses and children, occupation, place of residence, and date of emigration from Scotland. This is an important addition to the literature of Scottish immigration to colonial America, and, given the difficulty of identifying the participants in this extraordinary emigration, one worth waiting for.

Researchers on the trail of elusive ancestors sometimes turn to 18th- and early 19th-century newspapers after exhausting the first tier of genealogical sources (i.e., census records, wills, deeds, marriages, etc.). Generally speaking, early newspapers are not indexed, so they require investigators to comb through them, looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. With his latest book, Robert Barnes has made one aspect of the aforementioned chore much easier. This remarkable book contains advertisements for missing relatives and lost friends from scores of newspapers published in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia, as well as a few from New York and the District of Columbia. The newspaper issues begin in 1719 (when the "American Weekly Mercury" began publication in Philadelphia) and run into the early 1800s. The author's comprehensive bibliography, in the Introduction to the work, lists all the newspapers and other sources he examined in preparing the book. The volume references 1,325 notices that chronicle the appearance or disappearance of 1,566 persons.

Seven volumes of lists of Scottish immigrants to North America between 1625 and 1825.

Nineteenth-century emigration from Scotland to the U.S. was the continuation of a process that had its roots in the 17th century. Unlike the majority of European emigrants, who represented surplus rural workers from an agrarian society, the Scottish emigrants of the Victorian period were skilled, educated workers from urban industrial backgrounds whose expertise was in great demand in the rapidly industrializing cities of North America. Between 1825 and 1838, more than 60,000 emigrants left Scotland bound for North America; from 1840 to 1853, nearly 30,000 emigrated from there; and in 1881 alone, 38,000 left for the U.S. and 3,000 left for Canada, mostly via Greenock. In this context, we are pleased to publish the fifth installment (fifth book) in David Dobson's Scots in the USA and Canada, 1825-1875, a series designed to compensate for the lack of official Scottish passenger lists to North America during the 19th century (see also Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four). Containing about 1,800 sketches not found in the prior books, Part Five brings the total number of descriptions of the Scottish men and women and their families who were part of this great exodus to about 8,000. Dr. Dobson's findings come from primary sources in Scotland and North America. Parts One and Two derive from Scottish newspapers as well as from a handful of documents in the National Archives of Scotland. Part Three is based on the records of the Scottish Register of Sasines and Register of Deeds, as well as newspapers, found in the National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh. Part Four is based on documents housed at the National Archives of Canada in Ottawa, the Public Archives of Nova Scotia in Halifax, and a number of libraries and archives in Scotland. The data found in Part Five derives from newspapers and other documents in the National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh. Researchers will find a list of references at the back of each book. Dr. Dobson has arranged these expatriates alphabetically in each Part and, while the descriptions vary, he gives the individual's full name, place of residence in North America (country, state/province, or city), an identifying date, and the source of the information. In addition, many of the entries indicate the individual's date of birth, father's name and occupation or place of residence, spouse, or the name of the vessel upon which he or she arrived.

Drawing upon research conducted in both Scotland and the United States in manuscript and in published sources, David Dobson has here amassed all the genealogical data that we know of concerning members of the Society of Friends in Scotland prior to 1700 and the origins of Scottish Quakers living in East New Jersey in the 1680s. While there is great deal of variation in the descriptions of the roughly 500 Scottish Quakers listed in the volume, the entries typically give the individual's name, date or place of birth, and occupation, and sometimes the name of a spouse or date of marriage, name of parents, place and reason for imprisonment in Scotland, place of indenture, date of death, and the source of the information.

Lists of Scots who emigrated to America.