My family name comes from an extended family in County Cork. A prominent, aristocratic family, wealthy and powerful. This means that all those guys had a second cousin who owned a cow!!! Some of those second cousins even had shoes!! A very few had a window with glass in it!!!
Anyway, the whole area was nothing but cantankerous Irish hillbillies, Catholic as can be, and a center of resistance to the English. The Siege of Kinsale, 1601, where Spanish Catholics had come to the aid of Irish Catholics, happened just down the river from Cork. In 1601 the countryside was in rebellion against the English, and some my relatives, being certainly amongst the most reckless and foolish, thick headed idiots the lot of them, had to run after the Spanish were defeated. Some went to Spain, where my last name is not uncommon.
Of course, each new generation after that had it's crop of young men who had to leave home very suddenly. One bunch, some of mine, moved into western Pennsylvania around 1640-1700, and were followed by other family members, pretty much all young men (heh,heh), looking for a quiet place to avoid "trouble", shall we say. Saw an old heavily overgrown hilltop graveyard once, northwest of Pittsburgh a five hour drive, and found about thirty stones with my last name, the newest death date 1845, oldest you could read was 1780. Lots of stones we didn't find, and many of the stones were so worn you could not even feel the inscriptions. Second growth was up to 10" trunks. Civilization got so close with the War that they moved West, again. Still, those people must have made up a decent little town.
The westward movement was earlier and farther than the schools teach. Remember Daniel Boone was in Missouri with his family during the Revolutionary war.
My late and esteemed mother-in-law was talking about her family coming to America, names, dates, etc., Irish and German. In the 1880s and '90s. She asked me when my family came over, and really I didn't know. Some came over early, and a few came as late as 1799.
On my mother's side, Priscilla Carpenter - the "Speak for yourself, John Alden" girl, Mayflower passenger, is both an aunt and a grandmother as far as my grandad could figure.
The whole bunch of my ancestors, as far as I can find out, all had a below median annual income, shall we say. My dad put it "They didn't have a pot to p*** in."
Make a post on the number of French at Yorktown, please, and thank you.