Why they moved

These are the circumstances of the waves, not a diary for any one ancestor. Where the paper trail puts a documented person inside a wave, that is tagged below. A personal reason (“left because of X”) is only claimed when a source says so.

The paternal Maiale crossings — Sicily to New York, birds of passage, the Carini-to-Bagheria shift — are on ancestry.maiale.com/migrations/.

English Great Migration, 1620–1640

England in the 1620s–30s: Charles I ruling without Parliament, Archbishop Laud tightening church conformity, and a cloth-trade slump in the eastern counties. Roughly 20,000 English crossed to New England in twenty years. Most were not starving refugees; they were families who could afford a passage and who wanted a Puritan commonwealth, land, or both.

This tree’s share of that wave is large and sourced: John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley on the Mayflower (1620); William Denison of Bishop’s Stortford in 1631; the Norwich and Stonington founders (Minor, Palmer, Tracy, Hyde, Bliss, Post). Daniel Denison later wrote the only first-person emigration note in the file — his father left though “very well seated,” having heard of “the then famous transplantation to New England.” That is a documented motive. Everyone else in this cluster is placed by ship, town, and church records, not by a surviving letter.

See The Mayflower Line, The Denisons, Norwich & Stonington.

Baptist and Sabbatarian persecution, Massachusetts → Rhode Island, 1636–1670s

Massachusetts Bay treated religious dissent as a civil crime. Baptists were fined, whipped, and banished; Quakers were hanged. Roger Williams was expelled in 1636 and founded Providence as a refuge. A second, sharper split followed: Seventh Day Baptists, who kept Saturday as Sabbath.

This family did not watch that from England. They were in it.

• 🟢 Thomas Angell — original companion of Williams at Providence.
• 🟢 Elder John Crandall — whipped in Boston in 1651 with John Clarke and Obadiah Holmes for Baptist preaching; later Westerly’s first Baptist Elder.
• 🟢 Rev. Samuel Hubbard — organized the first Seventh Day Baptist church in America (Newport, 1671).
• 🟢 Rev. Joseph Clarke Sr. — brother of Dr. John Clarke, who spent years in London securing Rhode Island’s 1663 royal charter, the legal shield for that liberty.

They fled a theocracy, then spent four decades intermarrying in one dissenting town cluster. That is why Westerly and Newport are a single research page, not two surnames. See Newport & Westerly.

Palatine exile, 1709–1710

The Palatinate (Rheinland-Pfalz / Hessen) had been fought over for decades — French invasions, the War of the Spanish Succession — and then came the winter of 1708–09, one of the hardest in European memory. Vineyards and grain failed. In 1709 thousands of “Poor Palatines” went down the Rhine to Rotterdam and on to England. Queen Anne’s government shipped a large group to New York in 1710, intending naval-stores labor on the Hudson. The camps were brutal; many died on the voyage or in the first year. Survivors scattered into Dutchess, Columbia, and Schoharie counties.

🟢 This tree’s Barthel, Hack, Lutz, and Sornberger lines are that wave, later converging on Dutchess County. Johannes “John W” Barthel (1736–1808) is a documented Revolutionary patriot and the grandson of a 1710 Palatine immigrant. Four lines (Lutz, Rauch, Lott, Wolt) independently leave the same tiny village — Schweppenhausen, Bad Kreuznach — before emigrating, which is a real cluster, not a hint-merge.

See Confirmed Findings and Barrett–Barnes–Bartle.

Württemberg, ~1740s

A quieter, later German stream: Junghans and Seitter families from Ensingen and Flacht (near Ludwigsburg / Böblingen). Not famine-camp Palatines. The file has baptismal and marriage-register notes for this one; treat it as a documented parish-to-parish move into the same Dutchess County German world, a generation after 1710.

Irish Famine, 1845–1852 — and the people who came before it

Phytophthora infestans destroyed the potato crop that the rural poor depended on. About a million people died; about a million left. 1846–47 was the peak of the coffin-ship years. New York’s 6th Ward — Five Points — was where a great many of them first landed.

This family has both the Famine wave and an earlier Irish layer, and the paper trail is unusually good:

• 🟢 Andrew Curry (b. 1830, Ireland – d. 1911, Jersey City) arrived 1846, at the height of it. 1850 census: NYC 6th Ward. That is a complete Famine-emigration arc, not a guessed decade.
• 🟢 William Dowling (b. 1822, Dublin) arrived 25 Jul 1848, served in the U.S. Army, then went back to Dublin in August 1864 and died in the South Dublin Union workhouse the next year. Reverse migration is real and under-counted; this one is documented.
• 🟢 Andrew Kelly of Westmeath arrived 1860 — after the Famine proper, during the long tail of Irish departures. His parents stayed in Castletown Delvin.
• 🟢 Ward / McGowan of Fintona, Co. Tyrone, were born a generation before the Famine and were on Staten Island by 1865. Ann E. Ward arrived 1844, just ahead of the worst years, and married into Curry.

Do not flatten this into “the Irish side left because of the potato.” Some did, in 1846. Some were already here. One went home and died poor. See Dowling–Curry–Kelly.

Württemberg (and Baden) Germans to Waterloo, Ontario, 1840s

Not every German line in this tree went to Dutchess County. The Fellman / Zeisert group is from Ödheim and Willenbach in the Heilbronn country — historically Württemberg, not Baden. Christina Bachman, who married into the line, was from Baden. They crossed in the 1840s to Waterloo, Ontario, a German-Mennonite settlement.

🟢 Samuel Fellmann (b. 1 Mar 1820 – d. 12 Sep 1863) married Christina Bachman on 17 Oct 1847 in Waterloo Township; Bishop Benjamin Eby officiated (Deutsche Canadier, 22 Oct 1847). The 1851/52 census lists the household as Mennonite; Samuel was a miller. He is buried at Sandhills Baptist Cemetery — they landed in a Mennonite world and did not all stay in that church.

That is a different duchy, a different church, a different country, and a different decade from the 1710 Palatines. Three German waves, not one surname story. The generation-by-generation surname page is Fellman – Bachmann – Zeisert.

What this is not

• 🔴 Not a royal-refugee tale. The medieval/Plantagenet padding in the GEDCOM is folklore; see Debunked Myths.
• 🔴 Not “they all fled persecution.” The Great Migration mix is religion, land, and family. The Famine mix is starvation, chain migration, and (for William Dowling) a return.
• ⚪ Internal American moves — Dutchess to the Delaware frontier, New England to upstate New York in old age — are real and documented on the family pages. They are not transatlantic migrations and are not retold here.

DNA journeys that independently match these settlement clusters: DNA Corroboration.