The Great Migration Study Project

OR the last few decades, historians have been placing the colonists of early New England under a microscope in hope of finding better answers to a wide range of questions. What institutions did English emigrants carry with them from the Old World to the New? What were their motivations for migration? What demographic changes occurred in the population after arrival in the New World? Recent historical research on these questions has involved detailed study of whole communities or shiploads of immigrants, and the inquiry has inevitably led to the genealogical literature. Genealogy in New England began with the publication by John Farmer of his A Genealogical Register of the First Settlers of New England (Lancaster, Mass., i829), and since the incorporation of the New England Historic Genealogical Society in i 845 a steady stream of publications has added to our knowledge. Researchers interested in the earliest immigrants might therefore expect that seeking out the basic facts about these people would be a simple task. But this is not the case. For the broadest perspective on seventeenth-century New England settlers, we are still dependent on James Savage's Civil War-era Genealogical Dictionary of New England (4 vols., Boston, i860-i862), reprinted many times but never updated. Other studies with a narrower focus have been undertaken more recently (for example, the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire [Baltimore, I972; orig. pub. I928-i939] by Sybil Noyes, Charles Thornton Libby, and Walter Goodwin Davis, dating from the I930s), but even these are long outdated and incomplete. In short, any investigator, whether demographer, social scientist, or genealogist, must consult a dozen or more reference works to garner a basic collection of facts about individual immigrants-date of birth, place of origin in England (or Holland), marriage, children, wealth, education, and so on-and even then the job may be impossible to accomplish with the reference works available. There is a need, therefore, for a basic reference work on all the early settlers of New England-a prosopographical study that would be of value to all investigators and would alleviate the need to scour thousands of journals and monographs published since the middle of the nineteenth century

Political science · Latin American and Latino Studies · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies

• Tarih Araştırmalarında Prosopografi Yaklaşımı

  Open Access•Feyza Betül Köse•Mevzu – Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi•2023

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