RLP 344: Colonial American Research and “The Peopling of British North America”

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 344, Colonial American Research and “The Peopling of British North America”. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (49s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing?

Nicole (52s):
I’m great, and I’ve been working on the Research Like a Pro 14 day challenge and today’s day two. So I wrote my objective today and it was really fun to yesterday think about the different projects that I could work on, you know, do that bit of pedigree analysis where you think about progress you’ve made on different projects and what do I wanna work on next? So I ended up deciding on James Keaton for my objective. What about you?

Diana (1m 17s):
Oh, that’s great. Well, I always have so many different things I want to work on, but because I’ve been so heavily into the Weatherfords of Texas and Missouri, I had this little bit that’s bothering me. I just can’t figure out exactly when Henderson Weatherford might have died. It’s between 1860 and 1870. So I thought, I’m just gonna do this mini challenge and see if I can narrow that down, maybe do a little bit of military research to see if he joined any military units in Missouri or Texas, You know, during the Civil War look for some tax records in Missouri. So I have a few little things in mind for my research plan, and it may be that I don’t find anything else, but I want to at least have done the research and know that I’ve done it.

Diana (1m 59s):
So I’m looking forward to that. Just continuing on with what I’ve been working on.

Nicole (2m 4s):
That is wonderful. I think you will be able to narrow it down and it’s always good to look into those military records. With my project. I feel like I’m also continuing my Lucindrilla Keaton project, Lucinda Keaton. I think I usually refer to her that way because when I did the project, I find her father learned that another name she went by, or maybe her full name was Lucindrilla, but I always knew her as Lucinda. Well, in her father’s estate record, it mentions like 13 children or something like that. And so I’ve been going through and seeing which children do I need to gather more information on. And so in a past 14 day challenge, I researched her sisters, Mariah Keaton Sadler, and Sally Keaton Reeves.

Nicole (2m 48s):
And this time I thought I would work on her brother James Keaton, who moved to Mississippi, then moved to Texas, which I didn’t really know. I was just looking at the FamilySearch family tree for him. And it had the 1850 census attached. And it was so neat to see him living in the county where his sister was living in 1860. And I know that she was there because that’s where her daughter got married to James Harris. But I can’t find ’em on the 1860 census. And now I wonder if they were living with him and they just got missed on the census. Maybe they were in transit. But it’s so neat to, to be working on this seemingly unconnected project, but really these southern families were so connected to their family and their relatives, especially during hard times, that we really can’t research them in isolation.

Diana (3m 38s):
Oh, I agree. I think that’s what we have learned. It’s been a huge lesson for us learning that and something that really you just have to experience it to, to understand it because you can read about it and realize you should do it, but then you, when you really do it, it hits home, doesn’t it?

Nicole (3m 53s):
It does. Right. So I’ll be looking in Burlson County, Texas and also in Loundes county, Mississippi. And my research objective, what I actually wanna find, is who was James Keaton’s first wife? Because I saw that there is a marriage record for a probable second wife. I’m pretty sure that’s a second wife because in the 1830s census and 1840 census, he has a household that looks like it includes about five children. Then after those children are born, he has a new marriage record. So I think the first wife died and there’s a potential for three unknown children that haven’t been discovered yet. And two, one on the 1850 census and one who got married and lives near her father in Burlson.

Nicole (4m 38s):
So I’m hoping to find the other three children and see what I can learn about James Keaton.

Diana (4m 44s):
Well that sounds wonderful. I’m excited to see what you find out.

Nicole (4m 48s):
Yeah, we’ll have to report back the next time we record what we found out because probably by then the projects will be over.

Diana (4m 56s):
Yep.

Nicole (4m 56s):
Alright, well for today’s announcements, we are excited for our next webinar in the Research Like a Pro webinar series, and this one will be about Texas. So come join us on Tuesday, February 18th to hear Cathy Duncan, who will be sharing, Texas Migration Patterns and DNA Connect Lucinda Wright Rinker to Her Father. She has put together a great presentation about this research project that she did in our previous Research Like a Pro with DNA study group. Our next study group will begin in the fall, usually in August, and that will be the Research Like a Pro study group for 2025.

Nicole (5m 36s):
So be thinking if you’d like to join us for that. And if you have been a member of our study group in the past and you’d like to join as a peer group leader, please let us know, email us or apply on our website. We’d love to have you and you will receive complimentary registration for being a peer group leader. If you’d like to get our newsletter, join that on our website. You can get our email every Monday that has new blog posts, new episodes of our podcast, and any coupons or deals that we have going on for upcoming conferences. We will be attending RootsTech in Salt Lake City on March 6th through 8th. We hope to see you there. And I will be teaching in the North Carolina Genealogical Society Virtual Conference on March 28th and 29th.

Nicole (6m 19s):
There are four lectures each day, and the talk that I’m doing is about using AI tools to help with document transcription, summarization, and adaptation. So it will be fun. And there are several other wonderful presenters who will be there, so I highly recommend that you come. There’s Roberta Estes talking about Native American YDNA and Mark Lowe talking about discovering near North Carolina historic agricultural story. David McCorkle about using AI for land records and several other wonderful speakers. So it should be a great conference. And that’s $79 to attend.

Nicole (6m 60s):
Then we will be attending Louisville, Kentucky for the NGS Family History Conference May 23rd through 26th, which is over Memorial Day weekend. And we’re excited to do the research trip to Frankfurt on the first day of that. And then there’s a special Memorial Day ceremony at a nearby cemetery on the Monday. So that should be a really special conference to attend as well. And then Diana is going to be speaking at the Alabama Genealogical Society Spring Seminar, April 5th doing a Research Like a Pro seminar, registration opens for that on March 1st, and this is going to be an in-person presentation that she’s giving in Alabama in Montgomery.

Nicole (7m 42s):
So it should be really neat. That sounds fun, mom.

Diana (7m 44s):
I am excited to go to Alabama and I of course look to see how far away the Royston farm plantation back in the 1800s was from Montgomery. And it looks like it’s just about an hour away. So I’m planning on doing the trip over to Chambers County and perhaps finding the actual land and seeing if there’s some research I can do there in the archives, You know, in Montgomery or at the courthouse. So I’m excited for that. I haven’t been to Alabama yet, and it will be spring there, which I’ve heard is beautiful. And spring here in Utah is not so great yet it, it gets better, but April 5th it will still be kind of cold probably. Yeah,

Nicole (8m 25s):
Have snow in April still.

Diana (8m 27s):
Yeah. And we’re starting to get some, You know, some daffodils, a little bit of flowering bulbs and sometimes trees that are blossoming, but sometimes it’s later if it’s a cold spring. So we’ll see. Don’t know. But I’m excited to do that.

Nicole (8m 40s):
Right. I’m tempted to just join you because I’ve never been to Alabama either.

Diana (8m 45s):
Well, it would be fun. Yeah, it’s exciting to get to go and travel and do genealogy at the same time. It’s so fun. Well, today we are going to talk all about a book that I read. It was such an interesting book, I learned a lot. It was actually recommended by Josh Taylor during an institute course I took a year ago on researching your colonial immigrants. And of course, so many of our lines are colonial immigrants and many of them we have not traced back across the pond. In fact, I think only two or three of them have we been able to see where they came from. So the book that we are going to be talking all about that I read was by an author named Bernard Bailyn, and it’s titled The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction.

Diana (9m 34s):
So you know, if you, like us have Colonial American ancestors, maybe you are still searching for your original immigrants as well. And if you found your immigrant, maybe you’re still trying to figure out where they came from. It was really good for me to hear that I’m not alone in this challenging thing because people from Britain were immigrating to British colonies and so they just didn’t keep great records, You know, it was just like an extension of Britain. So those early years in the Americas, of course, were also very, very difficult for the colonists because they’re in a brand new land, a new climate, new types of soil, everything was new and they were just trying to survive.

Diana (10m 15s):
So record keeping would not have been high on the list of priorities in many cases. Even if they did keep records, you know, we’re talking 1600s,1700s, that’s a long time ago. And maybe have they haven’t survived the subsequent years.

Nicole (10m 31s):
Well, if we can’t find records of our colonial immigrants, we can at least learn from the historians who have studied the immigration patterns and we can develop a hypothesis based on what we do know about our ancestors and their group. Luckily, many scholarly works have been written on this topic and the people of British North America, An Introduction by Bernard Bailyn, provides a great look at what was happening in Britain and to some extent Germany and France during the colonial era of the 17th and 18th centuries. So it was great to have this book as our FamilyLocket book club selection back in the summer of last year.

Nicole (11m 12s):
If you have colonial ancestors from early America, then you might wanna read this and it’s only 131 pages and it can be a great way to form a hypothesis about one of your ancestral lines and how they arrived here.

Diana (11m 27s):
Right. And I appreciated that it was short because I have a lot of books I want to read, and the author, Bailyn, has written several other things that are longer. But this one was great because he writes in the introduction to people of British North America that it was originally a paper that he used to organize his thoughts as he studied colonial immigration. And it’s divided into three essays with these titles, Worlds in Motion, the Rings of Saturn, and a Doomsday Book for the Periphery. So we’ll talk about each of those in this episode. So he summarizes his theory at the very beginning of the book.

Diana (12m 8s):
He wrote this transforming phenomenon was the movement of people outward from their original centers of habitation that involved an untraceable multitude of local small scale exoduses and colonizations, the continuous creation of new frontiers and ever widening circumferences, the complex intermingling of peoples in the ever expanding border areas. And in the end, the massive transfer to the western hemisphere of people from Africa, from the European mainland, and above all from the Anglo-Celtic offshore islands of Europe, culminating in what Bismarck calls the decisive fact in the modern world, the people of the North American continent.

Diana (12m 50s):
So there’s a lot to say in that little introduction, but he takes that and then expands upon it so it becomes, you know, something that you can really internalize and understand.

Nicole (13m 2s):
Well, looking at the book, Bailyn uses extensive endnotes to support his writing. And I think this is fairly common for many historical works like this, to have them as endnotes rather than footnotes, although it does drive me crazy. I like to see footnotes on the same page. But this is just how a lot of historical books are. Well, his sources include numerous books and journal articles by historians as well as genealogical sources such as the William and Mary Quarterly. So when you look at his source list and you see something that is interesting to you or your hypothesis about your ancestors immigration, then you can go ahead and look in these sources to find more about your specific group and their immigration.

Nicole (13m 51s):
And so this is a great way to get an introduction to additional sources to look for. Well, this little book, The Peopling of British North America, is actually just kind of like a summary of his more comprehensive and larger work, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution. This is just like a shorter book. That’s probably why it’s called An Introduction because he has all this other research and longer work here to show. Well, Bailyn won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in history for this publication, Voyagers to the West.

Nicole (14m 31s):
And in 2013 he published The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He was born in 1922 and was lauded as an American historian specializing in early America.

Diana (14m 51s):
So people of British North America was fascinating to me as I’ve said, because as a Genealogist, I’m always wondering about why did my ancestors come to the colonies? And I was fascinated to read the four propositions that Bailyn develops as a starting point for the discussion. So the first proposition he maintains the immigration to the colonies was part of this natural movement in the homelands as people moved outward from their village of origin. And he goes on to talk all about the differences in the patterns of mobility in the 1600s and 1700s.

Diana (15m 32s):
And he explains that again and again, major issues, apparently unresolvable paradoxes in the peopling process can be resolved by reference to the domestic scene in the land of origin. And so I think that this all goes along with this idea of migration within the Western hemisphere as well as idea of, yeah, immigration. You look and see what was happening in the home country that made people want to leave and come to this new place. And he gives some really good examples from the Scottish Highlands, Southern England, London, and Germany. So I was pretty interested to hear about the Scottish Highlands and this whole idea of Ireland or Scotland because we have a lot of surnames in our family tree like MacChristian, Frazier, and Keaton, the Keatons we were just talking about.

Diana (16m 24s):
And so, you know, we’ve traced these ancestors quite a ways back. So it can be really helpful if we then review what was happening in the home country at the time that we think they might have come across the ocean. It can at least give us a hypothesis about their immigration and then maybe it could even help us to finding records in the home country. I think so often we just turn to look at passenger lists, but if those are not existent, then what do we do next? We throw up our hands and say, there’s no way I can ever figure this out. But if we really start studying the history and the context that can give us some new ideas, well, let’s have a word from our Sponsor.

Diana (17m 5s):
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Nicole (18m 8s):
Well back to the book, the second proposition that Bailyn makes is that there is no continuity in how new immigrants settled in the colonies. So he examines the differences between population centers such as New England, New York, and Boston, and says the greatest source of variety lay in the ethnic and cultural composition of the incoming groups. There was no single American pattern of family and community organization. There were many patterns reflecting the variety of human sources from which the population had been recruited and the swiftly changing fluid situations in which the people lived.

Nicole (18m 49s):
So he recognized that there’s no one overarching way to explain all the different kinds of people. Well, our Schultz ancestral line in North America began with Johan Val Valentine Schultz’s arrival in 1731, and he followed a common pattern for German immigrants, arriving in Philadelphia and then moving west to join other people of German origin. So Diana wrote about her research in Researching a German Colonial Immigrant Ancestor Valentine Schultz, which we can link to in the show notes, but it’s neat to see him following that particular pattern for his group.

Nicole (19m 33s):
And interesting to hear Bailyn talk about how the American pattern maybe didn’t exist, but there is a pattern for these individual groups.

Diana (19m 46s):
Exactly. Well, his third proposition deals with what happened after that initial colonization phase and explains the two main reasons for continuing immigration. So first we had the need for labor and second land speculation. So these were both new concepts for me that I really had not thought of. And he explains that the majority of the immigration in the 1600s was an effort to move people from England to the colonies to provide labor. And we’ve all heard of the indentured servants that came over and he says, of the estimated 155,000 people that came in the 1600s, the majority were these indenture servants coming mainly from London and its surrounding areas.

Diana (20m 32s):
London was just overcrowded and they were really looking for ways to get people out of there. And these people would’ve had basic labor skills. So of course they are going to need people to come over. And there was a high death rate in the colonies as well. So always needing new people to come in and and build houses, build whatever farm, you know, with basic labor skills. Basically if you were a body you could come over and do the work. But in the 1700s, the immigrants began to be more skilled in their chosen profession. And so Bailyn writes in page after page of the many extent letter books of the 18th century merchants involved in labor recruitment.

Diana (21m 15s):
The need for skills and not merely brute labor is spelled out, specified down to the last detail. The greatest need was for workers who could build things, who could repair things, and who could otherwise assist in maintaining the physical world of the maturing mainland colonies.

Nicole (21m 32s):
Wow. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. That they would need to have laborers and skilled people coming over to provide these labor skills that were needed to build the colonies. Well, if we discovered that our ancestor was a carpenter, joiner, bricklayer, pewter, et cetera, we can hypothesize that perhaps he was recruited to come to the colonies because of his needed skill. For example, William Copen was born about 1723 and died about 1805 in Prince William County, Virginia. He was a stone mason, a carpenter, and a calligrapher. Among the various records we have of William’s work in 1773, George Washington paid William to put the Washington name on his pew in the Po Hick church in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Nicole (22m 20s):
William’s name appears as Copan in George Washington’s colonial papers. William fits the profile of a young man recruited from England to start a new life in North America. Is it possible that William was the son or grandson of an earlier immigrant? Yes, but understanding of the immigration pattern of this time provides an alternative hypothesis. So in discussing land speculation as part of the settling of America, Bailyn reminds us of the 1763 piece treaty following the French and Indian War that opened new land in Nova Scotia and the Floridas. He gives an example of British landowners who sought to replicate the tenant farming of England in America and purchased huge land holds only to find that the wildness and abundance of land in America really made this a bit impractical.

Nicole (23m 13s):
Land speculators on a smaller scale recruited immigrants to first rent and then purchase land after years of laboring to clear the land, the speculator would either have his land cleared by the tenants or would sell the land to them after their years of labor. This exchange of labor for land aided both the speculator and the new landowner. Baylin proposes that land speculation attracted families often with means in their home country. So not just the poor immigrants, but those with means who wanted to get land by selling off their property. They could afford passage to America and buy or rent their new land. Bailyn says many of these free families were destined to be frontiersmen in each successive generation.

Nicole (23m 58s):
Consumers from the start, they were producers too and prolific contributors to the rapidly increasing population.

Diana (24m 6s):
This makes me think back to the book we read by Richard Bushman about the land and how they had big families because they needed to have these children to labor on the farms and build up their wealth. And you can just imagine if you’ve rented this land and then you’re trying to purchase it and it is so labor intensive to clear and to farm. So it just gave me a little bit different idea of land. I don’t know what I thought of originally, but it makes sense that people would buy at the land and become speculators. And we actually see that throughout later years in the 1800s when land would open up, their speculators would go in and buy up huge portions of land that they would lighter sell off.

Diana (24m 51s):
Well, in Proposition four, the last section of the book, Bailyn tackles the complicated issue of chattel slavery in North America. And he states American culture in this early period becomes most fully comprehensible when seen as the exotic far western periphery, a march land of the metropolitan European culture system. It was the juxtaposition of the two, the intermingling of savagery and developing civilization that is the central characteristic of the world that was emerging in British America. So I was curious to see how he would handle this whole idea of the slavery and the Native Americans that were already here.

Diana (25m 33s):
And we all know of the the brutality of the Indian wars and chattel slavery. And he does discuss that as the Europeans sought to make a new world wherever they’d landed, the wilderness was always near as were the dangers. But interestingly, Europeans were no strangers to the idea of slavery, but it always been on the margins, isolated work gangs, and it was not in their midst as it was in North America. He ends his final essay in Peopling of British North America with this statement, this mingling of primitivism and civilization however, transitory stage by stage, was an essential part of early American culture and we must struggle to comprehend it.

Diana (26m 18s):
What did it mean to Jefferson, slave owner and Phil itself? That he grew up in this far western borderland world of Britain looking out from Queen Anne rooms of spare elegance until a wild and cultivated land we can only grope to understand. And we were able to visit Jefferson’s mansion there in Virginia a couple years ago. And Nicole, you’ve been there too, and I totally get that. You know, you’re in this beautiful home and then you look out and you can see from miles around and You know, nowadays it’s a little bit more cultivated. But then it must have just been such a juxtaposition, so interesting to think about and so sad to think about all the enslaved people that were there.

Diana (27m 3s):
So although we would like to discover the original immigrant for each of our family lines, if they did immigrate during the the colonial years, we really may never know the ship, the year or the circumstance that prompted them to leave their home country. However, when we study and read books like The Peopling of British North America, we can start to get some understanding and perhaps create a hypothesis for each ancestor based on what we do know about them and the community that they lived in and things like surname and associates and their actual locations. So, you know, I would recommend the book.

Diana (27m 44s):
It is kind of a fascinating look and really opened up my eyes to a lot of things.

Nicole (27m 50s):
Well, I am looking forward to reading this and I think studying these kind of books about history, especially as we are researching our ancestors in that same place in time as the historical account we’re studying occurred, can really give us that context to have a better understanding of what was going on, give us clues to additional records to look for and help us develop hypotheses about where our ancestors came from and where they were going and why, which is really important to discovering more about them and extending their line back. So I think it’s important to do these studies and read these kinds of books and study the sources the authors used.

Nicole (28m 31s):
So thank you for opening our eyes to this resource and getting us started on our Colonial American research.

Diana (28m 38s):
Well, it’s just another example of how we don’t know what we don’t know. Right?

Nicole (28m 44s):
Right.

Diana (28m 45s):
Wonderful. So many things that we don’t know and we can expand our understanding and it really helps us in our research.

Nicole (28m 53s):
So true. Well, thanks everyone for listening and we will talk to you again next week. Bye-bye.

Diana (28m 58s):
Alright, bye-bye everyone.

Nicole (29m 0s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.