The transatlantic arc

Most family histories in the New World run the same shape: a family here, a crossing that brought them, and an origin they left behind. We trace that journey the way we build everything else — from public, downloadable records, every claim sourced and every uncertainty named. Eight stops, in order:

Ford Madox Brown's 1855 painting 'The Last of England': an emigrant couple on a crowded ship's deck, the white cliffs of Dover behind them. — Ford Madox Brown, The Last of England (1855) — a couple emigrating from England, the chalk cliffs receding behind them. It renders the emigrant experience of the age, not any identified family. Ford Madox Brown, 1855 · Birmingham Museums Trust · Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Act I · America — the family, here

Scottish clan surnames in America How many Americans bear each clan surname today (2010 Census) — and why a common name is naming history, not descent.
The first settlers of New England Savage’s Dictionary (1860): 25,000 settlers, the largest families, their ships and the English towns they left.

Act II · The crossing

The crossing Hotten’s Original Lists (1874): most went to Virginia and the sugar islands, not New England — and they went young.

Act III · The old country

The old country The Bremen dataset (735,545 records): the German and Central-European regions the emigrants left — and the decades the record forgot.
Locating the old country The home towns resolved against GeoNames and mapped — and the towns (Breslau, Danzig, Königsberg) whose country has since changed.
The people on the boat The person-level side: 735,000 named emigrants, and the families reconstructed from a flat manifest.

Act IV · Can the records be open?

The open archive — Estonia A genuinely open national archive (11M CC0 records), where the barrier is not licensing but transcription.
The open name index — Netherlands The thing everyone else gates: an open, CC0, person-level name index of ~370M mentions.
The wall varies by country: the anglophone index is proprietary, Estonia’s names are locked in handwriting, Poland has no dataset — and the Netherlands gives the names away.

The honest caveats travel with every page: a surname is not a lineage, a manifest lists only those who came that way, and a 19th-century genealogy is a finding aid, not proof of descent.