Ancestory

The crossing

Savage told us who arrived in New England. But New England was the small, tidy branch of a much larger and rougher migration — and to see the whole of it we cross to the other side of the ocean, to the registers of people leaving. In 1874 John Camden Hotten printed the surviving embarkation and muster lists of emigrants who went from Britain to the American plantations between 1600 and 1700 established [hottenLists] — port books, oaths, and colony musters. It is public domain, so we analysed the whole of it ourselves. Its title, Persons of Quality, is a Victorian flourish: most of the people in it are ordinary servants and labourers established [hottenLists] .

Where the boat was going

The destinations named in the lists — and the honest surprise of the whole page:

Virginia dwarfs everywhere — and after it come the sugar islands (St Christopher, Barbados, Nevis, Antigua), roughly level with New England. This is the point genealogy usually forgets: the New England families are over-represented in our records because they came as literate households who kept them; the far larger flow of young servants to the Chesapeake and the Caribbean mostly vanished from history. The boat, for most, was not the Mayflower.

How young they were

Ages of the 808 emigrants whose age is recorded — median 23:

The great bulge is 15 to 29 — the age of indentured service. People crossed the Atlantic young, bound to work off the cost of their passage; the few over fifty are outliers. (Infants recorded in months, not years — 8 of them — sit outside this chart.)

When they sailed

The years named across the surviving registers:

Two clusters, and a gap. The early musters and oaths run to the 1630s; then the record almost vanishes through the Civil War and Interregnum; then the great London port books of the 1670s return in force (the busiest single year is 1679). What looks like a migration pattern is really a survival pattern — which registers happen to have lasted.

The ships

The vessels named most often — the same fleet Savage’s settlers remembered boarding:

Ship names are the hardest thing to read from 17th-century spelling and OCR — treat this list as approximate.

Leaving, and arriving

The crossing is the hinge, so the names should join up on both shores — and they do: 498 of the surnames leaving England in Hotten also appear among the New England settlers in Savage probable [savageGenDict] . And 26 of the Scottish clan and sept surnames in our index are aboard these ships — the most frequent:

What Hotten can and can’t tell you

These lists are precious because they are so rare — and that rarity is exactly their limit. Only some ports’ registers survive, for scattered years; whole decades and whole harbours are simply missing established [hottenLists] . The counts here are ours, from optical character recognition of a 150-year-old book printed from 17th-century hands — approximate, and blended across registers that even recorded names in different orders. Read it as a finding aid and a shape, not a census. Next in the journey: the old country the ships left from — where the records are public but the clean datasets, once again, are not.

Stage 3 of 8 · The transatlantic arc

Sources