[IronJack]

This would provide an interesting adjunct to geneology research, I would think. It would also be interesting to postulate on why the migrations went where they did. I can understand the Cornish going to Wyoming; Cornish were miners and there were a lot of hard-rock mines in Wyoming. But I'm not sure what there is about Mississippi that would have attracted so many Scots.

The Upper Midwest is largely populated by Germans and Scandinavians, mostly because the climate is similar to their homelands, and because so many of them were farmers and land was free for the homesteading in the latter 19th century.

I'm sure there are other ethnic pockets around the country that can tie their existence to some historical event. Large parts of the Dakotas, for example, are peopled by refugee Germans who had immigrated to South Russia under Catherine and were exempted from military service. Later, during the wars of empire that wracked Europe in the 19th century, the Czars reneged on their agreement and began to conscript these displaced Germans. They fled wholesale and tended to stick together in the New World.

[blam]

Just went here: www.spatial-literacy.org. and did a search on my surname. Shows a large concentration of 'my' people in northern England/Southern Scotland.

[blam]

It was the Scots, who lost one of the clan wars that involved 'Bonnie Prince Charles,' that fled to North Carlolina in the 1700's.
In North Carolina they made their living logging, ship building and repitching ships from the boiled down resin from the native pine trees. It was from these 'pitchers' that North Carolina gets its nickname, The Tarheels.

I may be descended from some of these folks?

[stands2reason]

The Scots-Irish (lowland Scots who immigrated to the US from Northern Ireland) settled thickly in the South. Even Mississippi.