Hello.  

I am Linda Schreiber, and I want to announce the birth of a new
maillist called Common-Ground.  The list will focus on the earliest
settlements and early joint migration patterns of the Scotch-Irish and
the Palatine German/Swiss immigrants.  

We hope this new list will be useful, in coordination with the
existing Pfalz-L and Scotch-Irish-L lists, in helping us pull together
the queries/contacts and the historical/cultural information for our
bi-cultural ancestors, who became so intertwined early in their
immigrant histories.

As they got off the boats, mostly at the Delaware River ports, a great
many Palatine Germans and Scotch-Irish settled at first in a cluster
of counties in SE Pennsylvania, NE Maryland, and West Jersey.
Although of very different cultures, many began intermarrying within a
fairly short time -- some lines within a decade, some lines after a
generation or so.

From this early settlement area, blended clusters of people migrated
outwards mostly along two geographically divergent paths: east into
western PA>OH>IN>IL>KS etc, or southwards into VA>NC/SC>KY>MO>OK etc.
As our ancestor-searches move back in time, and backwards along these
divergent migration paths, we are coming back to that fork in the
road.

As we get closer to that fork in the road, we all need to be talking
to each other!  My brick wall in NC may be the younger brother, or
uncle, or first cousin of your brick wall in eastern OH.  I may have
the father of your Palatine brick wall because his sister married my
Scotch-Irish ancestor, and I've got them tracked.  In addition, you
may have acquired knowledge of Dunker or Lutheran religion, or how to
begin tracking German/Swiss emigrants abroad, while I may have
investigated Presbyterians or Methodists, and have experience with
genealogy in Northern Ireland.  Sharing is much easier than having to
reinvent wheels.  

To subscribe to the new list, go to 
http://www.onelist.com/subscribe/Common-Ground.  This site will walk
you through a quick and easy subscription process.  If you have any
problems accessing the list, let me know at [email protected],
and I will help out.

Then please introduce yourself, and the ancestors you are hunting, to
the listers there.  Let's see if we all can't make some serious
genealogical progress .


Linda Schreiber

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