Ancestory

The first settlers of New England

If the census told us a family was here, this tells us who was here first. In 1860 the antiquarian James Savage published a four-volume Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England — three generations of everyone he could document who reached New England before May 1692, arranged by surname established [savageGenDict] . It is long out of copyright, so we downloaded all four volumes and ran our own analysis over the text — the American counterpart to what we do with the medieval Scottish charters.

Our parse finds 25,140 individuals under 4,295 surnames. Of those surnames, 2,968 are still borne by Americans in the 2010 census probable [usCensus2010Surnames] — a direct thread from the first settlers to the surname map of today.

The largest families

The surnames that fill the most pages of Savage — a rough measure of how numerous each was:

Smith leads — occupational and everywhere, exactly as in the Scottish tax rolls — then the great early families: Weld, Williams, Brown, Clark, Allen, Rogers, Adams.

The ships

Here the story turns toward the crossing. Savage names the vessel a settler “came in” hundreds of times; these are the ships mentioned most — the real fleet of the Great Migration established [savageGenDict] :

The Mary and John, the Abigail, the Defence, the Planter — and the Mayflower, of course. This is the boat, three centuries before a passenger manifest would name it in a government file.

Where they came from

And the origin. The places Savage says settlers “came from” are dominated by one city:

London far ahead, then the English ports and cloth towns — Bristol, Southampton, Norwich, Yarmouth. Read honestly, this list blends true English origins with earlier homes (some “came from” Barbados, Virginia, or another New England town), and 1,839 entries mention England directly established [savageGenDict] . It is the England→New England bridge, in Savage’s own words.

Clan names among the settlers

New England was overwhelmingly English, not Highland — but the crossover is real: 52 of the Scottish clan and sept surnames in our index appear among Savage’s settlers. The most prominent:

A name in Savage is not a clan membership — most of these are English families that happen to share a name with a clan. The caution is the same one that runs through this whole site.

What Savage can and can’t tell you

Savage is a monument, but it is 19th-century compiled genealogy, and it must be read as such. It is selective — three generations only, and no one who arrived after 1692. It is error-prone: later scholars, above all Torrey, corrected many of its marriages and links established [savageGenDict] . And our own figures are approximate — the product of optical character recognition over a century-and-a-half-old text and our own parsing of it. Treat all of this as a finding aid — a map of where to look — never as proof of descent. See what DNA can and can’t tell you and the transatlantic arc for where this goes next.

Stage 2 of 8 · The transatlantic arc

Sources