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Looking through some of these threads, some have interesting ancestoral stories. It dawned on me that me as well as most of my family live no more than 10 miles from where all of the G Grandparents settled. Pretty dull stuff but it does make for easy cemetery look ups. How far have you travelled from the first landing?
Many of my ancestors have been in the Philadelphia region since colonial times - and I grew up around there too, my parents still live there. I moved to England for a while, now I'm in Colorado.
Oh but while I lived in England, I was living about a 20 min drive from where some of my English ancestors came from.
My family is predominately in Bedford/Somerset Counties in PA, and has been since the 1730's. I was born and raised in Pittsburgh and then Butler County PA and family was still in and around Bedford, so we were there a lot.
I'm now in CA, but in two years when we retire, we'll be heading back to Pittsburgh....
My grandparents came from Iowa to California. My dad's family stayed mostly in Alabama. Up until some seven years ago, I lived in socal, but its just not the place I grew up in. I had a chance to move to a more quiet, slower, and cheaper place to live. So I did. The first thought had been north west Kansas, but looking at the weather, I thought naw.....
So I'm actually closer to where several generations lived than before but because I decided to follow family traditon and pull up stakes and move.
My English grandparents came in through Boston but first settled in New Hampshire. For the last four years I've lived on the New Hampshire border here in Mass. But most of my life I lived in the other end of the state, near where they eventually put down roots.
For these same four years (to my recent amazement) I have also been living next to the town that my mother's
Puritan ancestors settled.
Isn't genealogy strange? For me, I keep coming full circle in many ways.
As a black American, my answer is rather complex. Because I've (and my mother) taken the Ancestry.com DNA test, I have a pretty solid understanding of where my some of European ancestors (I'm talking 4th-6th cousin estimates . . . we're related due to unfortunate but obvious circumstances that took place in slave quarters). One line settled in Nansemond, Virginia in 1654, though the line eventually settled in Halifax, NC, where I still have relatives (in Halifax and in surrounding counties). I do not know where my African ancestors were taken initially, though do know that some were sold "down river" to other owners.
But that's only half of my ancestry. My paternal grandmother's family immigrated to the U.S. around 1920 and went to NY, which is where my immediate family lives today.
My ancestors on all my lines were in Philly and South Jersey going back to the 1700s. One line came down here from Connecticut around 1800. My later arrivals, from Sweden, Germany, England, and Ireland in the 1860s-1880s all settled in this area too, either in Philly or south Jersey. I've also lived in this area all my life, now only about 40 minutes away from where I was born.
If I have a map to include Philadelphia County, and Camden, Gloucester, Salem, and Cumberland counties in NJ, plus a little bit into Burlington County, that's a map of nearly my whole family history.
I live in western Mass. Most of my ancestors came here to New England in the 1600s and my maternal grandfather came to Boston from southern Ireland in the early 1900s.
Beyond that, some of my father's ancestors settled in what is now Northampton by the 1650s, which is only a few miles from where I live now. My maternal grandmother's family settled in southeastern New Hampshire around 1640 (where she was born too). So, not much movement really.
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