My family tree, or at least my knowledge of it, continues to grow.

But I’ll start with the headline. Before I started this family tree thing, I wasn’t aware of any of my relatives having lived their lives outside the United Kingdom. Now I know that my relatives lived in Australia, South Africa, Canada, and above everywhere else, the United States of America. Across my mother’s and my father’s sides of the family, we have had relatives die (that’s the measure I use because quite a few returned to England) in forty-eight of the fifty States of the USA. Only Hawaii and South Dakota don’t hold my family’s DNA. I haven’t done a count up, but I’m sure it’s a few thousand or so.

My dad’s side has a sizeable dynasty in the US, centred in Ohio and Indiana, but spread across continental America. Sizeable groups lived and died in Washington State and Oregon, Kansas and Colorado, and down into Texas. Much of the wider spread is Twentieth Century mobility, with sixty-six deaths in California, and thirty-six in Florida leading the way, but the roots have stayed in the Midwest. It started with one couple arriving in New York in 1822, but has been supplemented by relatives arriving in Chicago, Illinois from Ontario, and Montana from Alberta.

Now I find a whole other group of British escapees from my mum’s side of the tree settled in the Peoria, Illinois, area. It seems that they moved rural North Devon and sailed to Montreal in Canada. From there, they caught another ship that sailed down the St Lawrence River, through Lakes Ontario, Huron and Michigan to Chicago, then down the Illinois River to Peoria. They swapped their Devon farms for new land in the Midwest, and established themselves and their communities in the middle of the Nineteenth Century.

Let’s not forget those who stayed in Canada and set themselves up in Newfoundland, Ontario, and Alberta; not as many as in the USA, but still more than I had reckoned on.

I saw a photograph of a bumper sticker today, coined after the recent 2024 US election, that said “This Country Was Built On Immigration”. My family have certainly played their part in that construction.