The Original Scots Colonists Of Early America

Lists of Scots who emigrated to America.

Improving upon his Original Scots Colonists of Early America, 1612-1707 (1989), which was based solely on UK source material, the author also draws on US sources in this alphabetical listing of the mostly banished Scotch prisoners and indentured servants who settled in the US in the 17th century. The appendices include copies of documents used to encourage emigration from Scotland to Nova Scotia. No bibliography or index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A compilation of all extant records pertaining to the original Scottish emigrants to the American colonies. Over 7,100 people listed of the approximately 150,000 Scots who emigrated to America before the Revolutionary War.

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.

Scots banished to the American plantations by Scottish courts due to various crimes between 1650-1775.

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

Mr. Dobson continues with his series of booklets pertaining to unexplored aspects of Scottish genealogy. The first of these new titles is his Scottish Quakers and Early America, the aim of which is to identify members of the Society of Friends in Scotland prior to 1700 and the Scottish origins of many of the Quakers who settled in East Jersey in the 1680s. Quakerism came to Scotland with the Cromwellian occupation of the 1650s. Scottish missionaries eventually spread the faith to various locations throughout the country, including Aberdeen in the Northeast, Edinburgh and Kelso in the southeast, and Hamilton in the west. The Society of Friends never grew to large numbers in Scotland, however, owing to its persecution by both the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches, as well as civic authorities. Understandably, a number of Scottish Quakers ultimately emigrated to the North American colonies; for example, there were some Scottish Quakers among the landowners of West Jersey as early as 1664, and between 1682 and 1685 several shiploads of emigrants left the ports of Leith, Montrose, and Aberdeen for East Jersey. 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. Without a doubt this is a ground-breaking work on the subject of Scottish emigration to North America during the colonial period.

This book began as Jean Stephenson's effort to validate the family tradition that her great-great-grandparents emigrated from Belfast to South Carolina under the leadership of Covenanter Presbyterian minister William Martin in 1772. The author was not only able to authenticate the crux of the story, but, in the process, to place nearly 500 Scotch-Irish families in South Carolina on the eve of the Revolutionary War.Genealogists will want to pore over the land evidences assembled by the author from entries found in the Council Journal, namely, authorizations, survey abstracts, wills, deeds and other records which demonstrate where each family settled, or was entitled to settle. The families, which are grouped under the vessel they traveled in, are identified by the name of the household head, names of spouse and children, number of acres surveyed, county, location of the nearest body of water and the names of abutting neighbor, and the source of the information.