Book Review: American Nations

I just finished a 2011 book by Colin Woodward called American Nations. The book is largely focused on trying to understand how North American politics works today based on emigration and settlements of different pre-colonial cultural & religious groups.

That history has a real application to genealogy, at least, the part where we try to understand who our ancestors were, what the believed and how they lived their lives.

Quick summary:

  1. It doesn’t matter where people came from, they become acculturated to the environment in which they live their lives.
  2. People didn’t just migrate to places in the United States where friends and family already lived. They migrated West within their cultural groups.
  3. Woodward has this really cool map of settlement patterns that can help you understand your ancestors’ culture, and
  4. That map can help you make educated guesses about where to look for records as you move back in time.

It’s these last two that I find fascinating and that I think makes Woodward’s book a good purchase. If you want to avoid the modern politics, just skip the last four or five chapters on modern cultural clashes.

Woodward posits that North America has eleven distinct cultural groups or nations, with nine of them pre-dating the Revolution.

I won’t go through them all—read the book, but in my wife’s family, there were really just four:

  1. Tidewater, an aristocratically inclined nation centered around the Chesapeake Bay
  2. Midlands, a moderate, pluralistic, Pacifist nation with Philadelphia Quaker roots.
  3. Yankeedom, a communitarian, utopian-inspired culture founded by New England Puritans.
  4. Appalachian, a libertarian-inclined nation founded by Scots-Irish settlers in the colonial Backcountry.

What’s fascinating is that these borders actually match to different branches in her tree, and I can almost always point to a particular event that had them cross.

First, take a look at Ohio. Woodward has this state split between three nations, Yankeedom, Appalachia and Midlands.

My wife’s maternal line has a lot of Ohio in it. Some Midlands Pennsylvania Dutch, some Appalachian Scots-Irish. For a more than a century, both families moved West within these boundaries.

The Scots-Irish line moved from the Virginia backcountry—what is West Virginia today—through Appalachian Kentucky, then Appalachian Southern Ohio, and finally Appalachian Southern Indiana and Illinois.

The Pennsylvania Dutch family went west through Pennsylvania—but only the Midlands Pennsylvania counties—to Midlands Northern Ohio.

How did the two families cross? Well, one branch of the Scots-Irish line ended up in Illinois along what Woodward asserts was on the Appalachian/Midland border, and then went to Midland Iowa. There, they met up with a branch of that Midland family that went all over Midlands territory, from Kansas to Iowa to Nebraska.

But beyond that, my wife’s maternal line is only Midlands and Appalachia.

My wife’s paternal line? Until the 1840s, there were really six distinct lines: three were Yankee, one dating back to the Mayflower, and another two that were acculturated in existing Yankee communities in New Brunswick and western New York. The fourth was pure Appalachian. The last two were ethnic German, one 100% Pennsylvania Dutch from colonial times, the other Germans from Russia.

These six lines had absolutely no geographic overlap until the mid 1800s. What brought them together? The Oregon Trail. Between 1843 and 1900, each branch went overland

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