Immigrant Trajectories Through the Rural-Industrial ... to 1850... · lish and Scottish as...

Immigrant Trajectories Through the Rural-Industrial Transition in Wales and theUnited States, 1795-1850

Anne Kelly Knowles

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 85, No. 2. (Jun., 1995), pp. 246-266.

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Immigrant Trajectories through the Rural-Industrial Transition in Wales and

the United States, 1795-1 850 Anne Kelly Knowles

Institute of Earth Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

G eographical analysis is an essential tool for understanding the causes and characteristics of migration at all scales,

from short-distance internal migration to emigration overseas. Case studies of nineteenth- century European migrations to the United States have repeatedly demonstrated that knowing the geographical context of emi-grants' decisions goes a long way toward ex- plaining their motivations. We now know that economic and social conditions in Europe could vary markedly from region to region and parish to parish and that the kinship networks which were so important to trans-Atlantic chain migration were usually anchored in particular localities.l Most research on British emigration has not had the benefit of detailed geographic information about migrants' ori-gins, their internal migrations before or after emigration, or their destinations overseas. The lack-of this knowledge has been a major ob- stacle of understanding the motivations and consequences of migrants' decisions (Van Vugt 1985; Baines 1985; Pooley and Doherty 1991).

This essay offers the first detailed geographical analysis of Welsh emigration and settlement in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. Except for two studies which I will discuss later, this period has largely been ignored by Welsh migration scholars, despite the fact that these early Welsh immigrants created most of the rural and industrial communities that would dominate Welsh-Ameri- can settlement well into the twentieth century (Allen and Turner 1988). M y analysis of this period is based upon the biographical information contained in immigrant obituaries, a source that has rarely been exploited system- atically for immigration scholarship. The obitu-

Annals 01 the Assocralron of An?encan Geographers, 85(2), 1995, p p 246-266 01995 by Assocat~on of Arnerlcan Ceogral~heri

aries provide sufficient locational and temporal detail to reconstruct much of the historical geography of Welsh emigration and settlement from 1795 through 1850. The biographical information they contain also makes it possible to examine the social characteristics of Welsh migrants during a period when rural, "folk" emigration is believed to have given way to emigration dominated by young individuals seeking industrial employment. Thus this essay also addresses the question of whether Welsh emigration passed through a rural-industrial transition in the early nineteenth century and, if so, how the transition was expressed spatially and socially.

This point leads to the larger issue of the nature of social transitions. The evidence offered here supports the view that major social transitions were gradual changes whose mod- ulation and complexity are visible in the trajectories of individual lives. Case studies of other immigrant groups implicitly argue for this inter- pretation of social process, but the point is worth making explicit in light of American historians' recent efforts to define the capitalist transformation of the countryside (Kulikoff 1990; Clark 1990; Rothenberg 1992) and the ongoing interest in transitional phases of capitalism's development in Europe (see, for example, Aston and Philpin 1985). Welsh migrants are suitable subjects for exploring this theme because they experienced extremes of rurality and industrialization, coming from both isolated, impoverished agricultural regions and some of the world's most densely populated, technologically sophisticated industrial districts (I. Davies 1990; G . A. Williams 1978). Their life histories reveal that the rural-industrial transition was neither quick nor necessarily one- way.

Published by Blackivell Publ~shers. 238 Maln Street, Cambr~cl~e, M A 02142, and 108 Cawley Roarl, Oxford, OX4 l iF, UK

24 Immigrant Trajectories

Locating the Welsh, the Least Visible of British Immigrants

When Charlotte Erickson described the Eng- lish and Scottish as invisible immigrants, she was referring to their tendency to blend into Anglo-American society and to eschew living in separate ethnic communities (Erickson 1972). Most Welsh immigrants to the United States, by contrast, stood out as people who spoke a foreign language very different from English and who tended to cluster together in clannish rural and industrial settlements. As subjects of scholarly study, however, the Welsh are among the least visible of British immi- g r a n t ~ . ~They have been passed over because of their relatively small numbers (Welsh-born residents of the United States peaked at just over 100,000 in 1891 [U.S. Census 19001) and because researchers have seldom exploited primary documents in the Welsh language. More significantly, the Welsh have been difficult to trace through standard sources. They may be greatly under-represented in British and American ships' passenger lists, for example. O f the 9,364 emigrants listed in British ships' registers for the period 1773-1 776, only 24 were identified as coming from Wales (Bailyn 1986). Port officials did not systemati- cally distinguish Welsh immigrants from English or Scottish passengers until 1908, and immigrants who embarked from small ports along the Welsh coast often went uncounted. Local records are also incomplete and problematic for Wales. Parish churches in Great Britain recorded neither internal migration nor emigration, and Welsh Nonconformist churches often kept no vital statistics of any kind on their mem bers.

Thus standard statistical sources on emigration are in short supply for early nineteenth- century Wales. Fortunately, the obituary col- umns published in Welsh-American magazines provide information that fills in many of the gaps. As increasing numbers of Welsh settled in the United States, a lively Welsh-language press developed in New York State, the leading destination for Welsh immigrants until mid- century. A series of monthly magazines ap- peared in rapid succession: The Calvinistic Methodists' Y Cyfaill o'r Hen Wlad (The Friend from the Old Country) in 1838; the Welsh

Congregationalists' Y Cenhadwr Americanaidd (The American Missionary) in 1840; and two Baptist monthlies by 1845, Seren Orllewinol (Western Star) and Y Beread (untranslatable). They all followed the template established previously by popular magazines in Wales, printing sermons and moral essays along with topi- cal news items, poetry, and hymns (Jenkins 1933). Most important for immigrants, the American publications notified readers of job opportunities at iron works and coal mines, on farming conditions and the price of land, and on the quality of religious provision in new settlements, as well as births, marriages, and deaths in Welsh communities across the United States.

It is the obituaries that concern us here. The level of detail in the obituaries varies; some list only the name of the deceased while others fill several paragraphs with evocative life histories. What makes the obituaries extraordinary as a source for immigration research is the geographical information they contain. Of the several thousand obituaries considered for this study, about half include individuals'home parishes and farm names in Wales and the locality where they settled in the United States, thus making it possible to map immigrant origins and destinations with some precision. A smaller number of obituaries also name one or more places where an individual stopped en route, thus revealing traces of internal migration in both countries.

M y database of individual immigrants in-cludes all the geographical and historical information contained in the obituaries published in the four monthlies mentioned above. I limited data collection to the years 1838-1 853 both to keep the size of the database manageable and to make it as representative as possible of the immigrant population since obituaries in Y Cy-fail1 and Y Cenhadwr increasingly favored socially prominent adults in later years. The database includes every obituary that names at least one place in Wales (specified to the level of the county or better) and one in the United States (specified at least to the level of a state). When purged of a small number of duplicate and dubious entries, the survey yielded 1,771 trans-Atlantic migrants whose movements can be traced between at least two locations. From the first recorded departure in 1791 to those who died in 1853, the obituary data span a

:48 Know

period of over sixty years and two generations of Welsh immigration.

Although these obituaries provide exceptional longitudinal data, their flaws as an historical source should be kept in mind. Like any source based on recollection, they may contain factual errors (Willigan and Lynch 1982), though the dates of landmark events such as emigration were probably deeply engraved in family memory. The possible under-repre-sentation of certain groups is the most important bias in the Welsh obituaries. The sporadic publishing of Baptist journals may result in the under-representation of Welsh Baptists in the data set. This in turn may mean that the data under-represent emigration from industrial areas of South Wales where the Baptists were a leading denomination. The obituaries men-tion only a handful of Welsh Mormons out of the many hundreds who emigrated to Utah with the Welsh missionary Captain Dan Jones in 1849 and 1853 (Carter 1949; Dennis 1987). The data may also slight Welsh Anglicans and Wesleyan Methodists, although those denomi- nations accounted for less than 10 percent of all Welsh-American congregations at mid-century (E. Jones 1837; Chidlaw 1840).

Origins of Welsh Migrants

Figure 1 begins our analysis of the raw obituary data. The map plots the first known residence of each migrant whose obituary specified a place of origin at the level of the parish or some smaller unit; these number 1,548 out of the total of 1,771 migrants. Four regions dominate the map: 1) Pen LIvn, the tip of Caer- narvonshire's LlPn Peninsula; 2) the region between Bala and Llanbrynmair; 3) central Cardi- ganshire; and 4) north Glamorgan and Mon- mouthshire, including the town of Merthyr Tydfil. These four regions correspond to ac-knowledged centers of early nineteenth-century emigration. They also include the four counties (Cardigan, Monmouth, Montgomery, and Merioneth) reported as having the greatest number of emigrants during the first five months of 1841, when British census-takers made a rare attempt to tally figures for overseas migrants (Hartmann 1983; D. Williams 1935).

Table 1 records the migrants' first-known residence and their place of departure as noted in the obituary data. Although only 237 of the

obituaries mention moves prior to emigration, they indicate two basic kinds of internal migration. Short-distance moves predominated in North Wales, particularly in Caernarvon, Merioneth, and Montgomeryshire. These relo- cations, which accounted for 60 percent of all pre-emigration moves in the obituaries, typically coincided with marriage, apprenticeship, or a period of employment as an agricultural laborer. A different pattern of internal migration prevailed in South Wales where almost all moves by natives of Carmarthen, Brecon, Gla- morgan, and Monmouthshire took them to the industrial district in Glamorgan and Mon-mouthshire. The iron works in Monmouthshire drew the greatest number of internal migrants. This pattern matches the evidence of internal migration in the 1851 British census, which shows that over 60 percent of all migrants living in the iron district had been born in one of the adjoining Welsh counties (Glamorgan, Monmouth, Carmarthen, or Breconshire) and that only 5 percent came from North Wales (Census o f Great Britain 1854). The obituaries also include a handful of individuals who migrated long distances to England or the continent before traveling to the United States.

Internal migration thus appears to have pooled future emigrants from South Wales in the industrial region of Glamorgan and Mon- mouthshire while scarcely altering the overall distribution of those who left from the northwest. The core emigration regions remained the same. The obituary data thus confirm Brin- ley Thomas's observation that the industrial district was a magnet for internal migration from South Wales as early as the 1830s while qualifying his over-arching conclusion that the rise of Welsh industry prevented heavy emigration from Wales (Thomas 1959; 1987). The evidence here suggests that certain rural localities such as Pen Llpn, Llanbrynmair, and central Cardiganshire were virtually untouched by migration to the iron district up to 1850 but that they may have been heavily affected by the loss of population to emigration.

The three regions in the northwest shared a number of important characteristics. They were the least economically advanced parts of Wales, the slowest to industrialize, and the most profoundly anchored in traditional agriculture. They were the stronghold of Welsh Nonconformist religion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as the heart


Figure 1. Emigrant origins and emigration regions, 1791-1853. The migrant obituaries record the greatest number of departures from four main regions indicated by the curved outlines on the map.

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Table 1. Origins and Places of Departure of Welsh Emigrants.

Place of First Origin1 Known Place of Net Departure Residence Departure Change

North Wales Anglesey 119 111 -8 Caernarvon 264 260 -4 Denbigh 70 7 7 +7 Flint 22 21 -1 Merioneth 172 169 -3 Montgomery 264 258 -6

South Wales Cardigan 293 273 -2 0 Carmarthen 115 89 -2 6 Pembroke 35 30 -5 Radnor 5 6 +I Brecon 67 57 -1 0 Clamorgan 182 197 +I5 Monmouth- 145 194 +50

shire England 18 24 +6 Continent 0 5 +5

Totals 1,771 1,771 Sources: Welsh immigrant obituaries.

of Welsh-speaking Wales. Despite their common culture and agrarian way of life, however, each of the three regions had a distinctive emigration history that reflects the influence of local factors (Figure 2).

In the case of Pen Llpn, the coincidence of emigration and land enclosures points to a local crisis over access to resources that were necessary for subsistence. Pen Llpn is an ex- posed headland of heathy moors, deep cliffs, and small farms. Cottagers on the Llpn supplemented the meager produce of their rented land with fishing, coastal trading, and exploiting the fuel and pastures available on extensive common lands. At the turn of the nineteenth century, these people faced a subsistence crisis when Parliament passed a series of acts that enclosed 22,000 acres on Pen Llpn (Chapman 1992). The provisions of the 181 2 act to enclose Aberdaron common, for example, called for payment of the expenses of enclosure "out of the sale of portions of the common lands," thus reducing the amount of land available to commoners. The act also prohib- ited commoners from grazing sheep on en-closed land for seven years and it restricted their turbary rights (the right to gather peat for

fuel) to just 300 of the 6,000 enclosed acres (Bowen 191 4:19-20).

The obituary record of emigration from Pen Llpn begins in 1795 and shows a peak in 181 8 following two successive crop failures. The fact that most of Pen Llpn's emigrants came from districts where land was successfully enclosed3 (Dodd 1971; Chapman 1992) suggests that enclosure was somehow related to emigrants'departures. It is possible, however, that the emigrants' departures cleared the way for enclosure by removing many people who resisted, or would have resisted, the legal restrictions on access to the common. other sources suggest that the proportion of Pen Llpn residents who emigrated between 1795 and 181 8-an annual rate of about 7 per thousand-may have been as high as in regions of heavy emigration in Sweden, ~ e r m a n ~ , and other parts of north- western Europe later in the century (G. A. Wil- liams 1980:129; Ostergren 1988; Gjerde 1985).

Thirty miles to the east and south, in the hilly region between Bala and Llanbrynmair, emigration occurred in more regular waves and over a longer period of time. Here the driving forces appear to have been a combination of ideology, the influence of local leaders, and decline in the region's textile industry. Emigration from this area had a venerable history, dating back to the late seventeenth century when Quaker families from Dolgellau, Merionethshire joined William Penn's colony in hopes of establishing an independent "Welsh tract" in ~enns~ lvan ia (Dodd 1956). The notion of emigration as a way to achieve independence took on fresh meaning one hundred years later, when two young men from leading Congregationalist families in Llanbrynmair were inspired by the political writings of a radical Welsh Baptist minister, Morgan John Rhys, to join his new colony in central Pennsylvania. Rhys envisioned overseas colonization as a way for the Welsh to preserve their culture and gain political independence from oppressive English rule ( G . A. Williams 1980; Bebb 1945). His ideas found their most vocal advocate fifty years later in Michael D. Jones, a Congregational minister from Llanbrynmair who taught theology at the Congregational seminary in~Bala. In the 1840s, Jones began campaigning in Wales and the United States for the establishment of an independent Welsh homeland (gwladfa) on an isolated frontier overseas. Although he did not muster sufficient numbers of colonists for such


" Departures from Main Emigration Regions - * X l " S h r i r 2 1 xi'' 8 " a * "

Region 2: 20-4-Bala to m

Llanbryn- .E 15-

mair z I O - & n5 5 -C

1 - - I I - I - I 1795 1800 181 0 1820 1830 1840 1850

1 Region 3: ;15, 1840 , 1 cardigan-shire

E 2 1

I Region 4: 25, 1 Iron

5 20-District .-m5 15-"-

z 10-n 5

5 -

1 -- -I I- -I 1795 1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850

Figure 2. Dates of departure from main emigration regions. The distinctive chronology of departures from each region reflects the particular processes and circumstances at work in each area.

a settlement until 1865, Jones's arguments may emigration was Benjamin W. Chidlaw, who have helped spur the increased numbers of emigrated from Bala with his parents in 1810 emigrants who left Merioneth and Montgom- and became a bilingual preacher in Ohio. In eryshire for the United States in the 1 840s4 1835 and 1839, Chidlaw returned to North

The region's most influential spokesman for Wales, where he polished his Welsh before

wles

congregations who were as eager for news of America as for a good sermon. The obituaries mention several local people and one man from Cardiganshire who accompanied Chid- law on his return to the States in 1839. The influence of his guidebook for Welsh emi-grants, Yr American, which was published in 1840, may be reflected in the peaks of departures from the region in the early 1840s (Chid- law 1890; 1840).

The decline in cottage textile production was an underlying factor in the relatively heavy, re- current waves of emigration from Mont-gomery and southern Merionethshire. Bala, the leading center for knit stockings in Wales and Llanbrynmair, with eight small-scale woolen mills and 500 out-workers circa 1840, was the most important rural parish in Montgomery- shire's weaving industry. Competition from mechanized English mills increasingly undercut these rural producers, forcing many out of business by 1850 (J. Davies 1990; Dodd 1971; Shepperson 1957). Although the obituaries note only one weaver among the emigrants from this region, the peak in emigration in the 1840s may reflect the impact of lost textile employment.

In the third rural region, central Cardigan- shire, yet another set of circumstances ob-tained. The obituary data suggest that emigration from this area began relatively late and gradually gained momentum. Neither enclosure, ideology, nor declining rural industry explain the pattern in Cardiganshire. In contrast to Pen LlPn residents, central Cardiganshire tenant farmers and smallholders violently re-sisted enclosure when it came in 1820-1826 and so retained use of their common lands (D. Williams 1952; Phillips 1971). Most of the region's conservative Calvinistic Methodist ministers, unlike Congregationalists to the north, did not publicly advocate emigration. Nor did central Cardiganshire have any significant rural industry. Its marginal tenant farmers and freeholders pieced together a subsistence through seasonal agricul~ural migration and stints of work at the lead mines in northeastern Cardiganshire or the iron works in Glamorgan and Monmouthshire (Knowles 1993).

The best explanation is that the pattern of departures from central Cardiganshire is the classic one of chain migration in an isolated region where population pressure on limited resources was becoming acute (Ostergren

1988). A number of parishes in central Cardi- ganshire registered their highest population for the century in the censuses of 1831 or 1841. Squatters upon the common, including many who had resisted enclosure in the 1820s, whit- tled away the amount of land that was actually available for common use, and existing farms were subdivided into increasingly small alloca- tions. Tithe Commissioners' surveys of the region in 1837-1 845 show that nearly 64 percent of freeholds and 40 percent of tenant farms had fewer than ten acres, which at best was half the amount of land required to support a family in this part of Wales (Knowles 1993; Howell 1978). As favorable reports filtered back from families who had ventured west, more and more local people came to see emigration as a better alternative than a life of marginal farming and temporary or seasonal labor away from home. They received some timely advice in 1837 when a Cardiganshire-born minister named Edward Jones visited his native district and published an emigrant guide book in Aberystwyth (E. Jones 1837). Jones's practical guide offered Cardiganshire farmers and cottagers a clear choice when bad weather decimated their crops in 1839 and 1841 (Howell 1978; A. Davies 1984; Owen 1975).

The fourth emigration region, southeastern Wales, differed dramatically from those in the northwest. This area of whale-backed hills and long, narrow valleys saw the birth of modern industry in Wales. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, English capitalists recognized the region's wealth of natural resources for making iron. By 1830 they had transformed northern Clamorgan and Monmouthshire into a dense industrial conurbation with dozens of blast furnaces, rolling mills, and coal mines (J. Davies 1990; Riden 1986).

The iron district is the only emigration region where departures clearly followed economic cycles. The sudden onset of emigration in 1830 coincided with a period of acute depression and labor unrest in the Welsh iron industry, as did the surge of departures in 1832 and 1841 (G. A. Williams 1978; J. Davies 1990). At the same time that industrial workers in South Wales were facing unemployment and falling wages, new iron and coal works in the United States were actively seeking skilled workers. In 1830, for instance, the Delaware and Hudson Railroad recruited seventy Welshmen to intro-

Immigran

duce sophisticated mining techniques at coal mines in Carbondale, Pennsylvania. By 1833, that town had enough Welsh immigrants to support three Nonconformist churches (W. Jones 1993; D. Williams 1975; Hartmann 1983). And where Welsh foremen went, skilled Welsh work-crews followed. Soon a Welsh network was in place linking the mines and iron works in South Wales to young industrial settlements in eastern Pennsylvania, north-western Maryland, and the rapidly developing industrial core around Pittsburgh.

The Welsh immigrant obituaries thus depict emigration as being concentrated in four main regions, each of which had a distinctive historical geography up to mid-century. The differences between them suggest various kinds of motivation at work. While emigration from the industrial southeast clearly reflected migrant response to industrial depression at home and new opportunities abroad, emigration from the rural northwest coincided with various local events which had less to do with economic cycles than with the hardships of subsistence farming, the influence of local leaders, and the workings of chain migration. Had all Welsh emigrant decisions been influenced strongly by national or international economic cycles, as Brinley Thomas argued for the second half of the century (Thomas 1959), one would have expected to see a more uniform ebb and flow of emigration from Wales. Instead, the obituaries depict Welsh emigration as being concentrated in particular regions, as was emigration from other northern European nations.

The loss of emigrants from those regions may have been significant, both as a proportion of the local population and as a strain on the social fabric of rural neighborhoods. With- out knowing exactly how well the obituaries represent the overall emigrant population, however, one cannot say if emigration from Pen Llyn, Bala-Llanbrynmair, or central Cardi- ganshire was actually heavier than emigration from other parts of Wales in this period. Equal or greater numbers of people may have left areas that appear as blank spots in Figure 1. These blank areas include the most anglicized parts of Wales, such as the industrial districts of the northeast, the agricultural lowlands of the Clwyd Valley and the Vale of Glamorgan, and growing port towns along the southern coast (Pryce 1975; 1988; J. Davies 1990). M i - grants from anglicized regions may have

avoided ethnically Welsh settlements where local culture was Welsh-speaking, choosing instead to mingle with other "invisible" British immigrants or with Americans. The other re-gions with few emigrants were thinly populated moorlands and mountains-the natural barriers that insulated Welsh Wales from outside influences even as they inhibited transpor- tation and economic development-namely Snowdonia in the north, the Cambrian Moun- tains along the eastern border with England, and the Black Mountains to the south (Dodd 1971; Leigh 1833).

Destinations of Welsh Migrants

Regional emigrations created a number of Welsh settlements with regional identities in the United States (see Figure 3 and Table 2). Generally speaking, the older the settlement, the more likely it was to be dominated by immigrants from a particular part of Wales. For example, obituaries from the community in Oneida County, New York show that it was predominantly a North Walean settlement with strong representation from Caernarvonshire. Settlers from Pen Llyn first reached the area in 1795, just three years after the first American pioneered a farmstead in the county (Roberts 1914). Similarly, the early Llanbrynmair settlements at Ebensburgh, Pennsylvania and Paddy's Run, Ohio continued to attract immigrants from Montgomeryshire throughout the first half of the century. Cincinnati was a popular destination for immigrants from Montgomery and Cardiganshire (L. Davies 1910; D. J. Williams 1913). So many of the Welsh in Ohio's Jackson and Gallia counties came from Cardiganshire (nearly 76 percent according to the obituaries) that the area became known as "little Cardiganshire" among the Welsh-American community (Conway 1961 :65).

The Welsh were not exceptional in this. En- during regional connections were typical of European immigration throughout the nine-teenth century. Traditions of internal migration also linked North Wales with Liverpool, Mid Wales with Shrewsbury, and Cardiganshire with London (Shepperson 1957; Pryce 1975; Pooley 1983; Pooley and Doherty 1991; Knowles 1993). While the "friction of distance" per se may not have operated across the At-

254 Knowles

N E W YORK

VIRGINIA

0 50 100 150 m~les

Figure 3. Welsh-American settlements, 1791-1853. By far the largest proportion of migrant obituaries are from New York State. New York's Oneida County had the largest cluster of rural Welsh settlements up to 1850. Ship-board diseases and the stress of the journey claimed some migrants'lives before they reached their intended destinations.

lantic (Grigg 1977), the principle of following the path of least resistance (or least uncer-tainty) clearly did, particularly during the first four decades of the century.

After 1840, Welsh immigrants established smaller settlements in Wisconsin, Iowa, Min- nesota, and states further west. Although these communities rarely exceeded 1,000 Welsh-born residents, some of them achieved re-gional concentrations comparable to the older eastern settlements. Most industrial settle-ments were more heterogeneous, despite the notable presence of immigrants from Clamor-

gan and Monmouthshire. They did include some intriguing regional clusters in particular occupations, such as Caernarvonshire slate miners in Peach Bottom, Pennsylvania and Cla- morganshire iron workers at Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia (named after the Tredegar furnace and rolling mills in M o n -mouthshire).

Urban settlements, while generally more mixed than the older rural communities, are more difficult to assess. The large numbers of obituaries from New York City, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati may not indicate the true proportion


Table 2. Regional Concentrations of Welsh Immigrants by Place of Origin.

Place of Death Place of New York Pennsylvania Ohio ElsewhereOrigin1 Departure Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Total

North Wales Anglesey 74 (62.2) 15 (12.6) 11 ( 9.2) 19 (16.0) 119 Caernarvon 180 (68.2) 35 (13.3) 1 2 ( 4.5) 37 (14.0) 264 Denbigh 24 (34.3) 1 7 (24.3) 1 8 (25.7) 11 (1 5.7) 70 Flint 11 (50.0) 4 (18.2) - - 7 (31 .8) 22 Merionetha 102 (59.3) 15 ( 8.7) 24 (14.0) 3 1 (18.0) 172 Montgomerya 97 (36.7) 46 (17.4) 94 (35.6) 2 7 (10.2) 264

All North Walesa 489 (53.7) 132 (14.5) 159 (17.5) 131 (14.4) 911

South Wales Brecon 11 (1 6.4) 35 (52.2) 15 (22.4) 6 ( 9.0) 6 7 Cardigan 59 (20.1) 67 (22.9) 140 (47.8) 2 7 ( 9.2) 293 Carmarthena 32 (27.8) 48 (41.7) 25 (21.7) 10 ( 8.7) 115 Glamorgan 48 (26.4) 77 (42.3) 26 (14.3) 3 1 (1 7.0) 182 Monmoutha 10 ( 6.9) 102 (70.3) 1 7 (11.7) 16 (11.0) 145 Pembroke 10 (28.6) 8 (22.9) 11 (31.4) 6 (1 7.1) 3 5 Radnor 4 (80.0) - - 1 (20.0) - - 5

All South Wales 174 (26.2) 337 (71.9) 235 (59.6) 9 6 (42.3) 842

Outside of 6 (33.3) 4 (22.2) 4 (22.2) 4 (22.2) 1 8 Walesa

Overall totals 669 (37.8) 473 (26.7) 398 (22.5) 231 (13.0) 1.771

aThe proportions in these rows sum to 99.9% or 'I 00.1% due to rounding error Sources: Welsh immigrant obituaries.

of the Welsh population in those cities. All likewise was baffled by the Cardiganshire farm- three were important entrepats for immigrants ers who insisted on settling in Jackson and Gal- of all nationalities, but they may also have had lia counties, a region whose poor soils and higher rates of immigrant mortality than rural rocky hills reminded another welsh preacher settlements. For example, the Welsh obituaries of the valley of parched bones in the Book of register the impact of shipboard diseases on Ezekiel (Jenkins 1872). Chidlaw commented immigrants quarantined in New York as well as on this practice in his guide book: "The Welsh a spate of deaths due to a cholera epidemic in tend to remain unfortunately in the old settle- Cincinnati in 1849. The significance of these ments, choosing high and rugged land; but cities to Welsh immigration needs further re- having left their homes as well as the religious search. facilities they once possessed, they might as

The tenacity of Welsh regional connections well endeavor to secure a good place and pro- vexed some immigrant leaders. O f his country- ductive land, since the district is certain to men in Oneida County, Richard Edwards com- flourish and religious amenities will follow" plained: "I am not against the Welsh living to- (Chidlaw 1840:42-43). gether in a Welsh settlement in this country But would they? Like Dutch Calvinists and I am not against them keeping their own (Swierenga 1985; 1991), rural Welsh immi-language either, but I am against them settling grants most fully recreated and preserved their in mountainous districts where the land is cov- traditional way of life in a limited number of ered with snow for five months of the year, fairly large, inward-looking communities. Sus- when the fertile lands of the Mississippi are tained access to affordable land was essential much cheaper and have a more pleasant cli- to the process because, unlike the Germans mate" (Conway 1961 :68). Benjamin Chidlaw and scandinavian immigrants who quickly es-

tablished communities of several thousand residents in the rural Midwest, the smaller numbers of Welsh typically needed ten to twenty years to gather even one thousand settlers in a single settlement. The Welsh tended to settle in hilly areas not so much because they felt an affinity for rugged landscapes but because Americans and wealthier European immigrants bought up the best land on the agricultural frontier. The leftover islands of un- claimed or lightly developed inferior ground posed challenges that were familiar to Welsh hill farmers who were glad to be able to buy land adjoining friends' and relatives' farms. A slow pace of development made it possible for Welsh immigrants to buy government land in Jackson County for $1.25 per acre and im- proved farms for $7.50 per acre as late as 1850, more than thirty years after the first Welsh settlers arrived in the area (Abstracts of Title; Ohio State Board of Equalization 1860).

Some areas with mediocre farmland ap-pealed to Welsh immigrants for other reasons as well. In the same letter in which he assured fellow immigrants that they would succeed as farmers in Jackson-Gallia if they manured and limed the soil "in the same way that we tilled the land in Wales," Cardiganshire farmer John Jones noted that charcoal iron furnaces in the area always welcomed Welsh workers (J. Jones 1845:247; translation by this author). One of the most interesting messages to emerge from the obituaries is that some Welsh immigrants were interested in both farming and industry. The customary division between rural and industrial immigration thus becomes blurred in the case of the Welsh who gravitated to many different kinds of destinations, including rural areas with small-scale industry such as Jackson- Gallia. The migrants' social characteristics as well as the complexity of some migrants' life- paths also make it difficult to label them as purely rural or purely industrial migrants.

Demography and Occupations: Tracking the Rural-Industrial Transition

The timing of the transition from rural to urban, from agricultural to industrial emigration affords an important index of economic change within sending and receiving countries.

In Britain and elsewhere, heavy emigration from agricultural areas was one signal that capitalist economic relations were changing rural life, typically through the enclosure of com-mon lands, the commercialization of agriculture, and the decline of cottage industry, all of which had the effect of displacing rural people. Similarly, emigration from industrial areas was a typical response to the periodic economic contractions that were characteristic of industrial capitalism (Aston and Philpin 1985; Bodnar 1985; Harvey 1982). Concurrently, the stage of capitalist development in the receiving country and the needs it created for particular kinds of labor or capital investment amplified or dimin- ished its attractiveness to various kinds of emigrants. In emigration history, the rural-industrial transition normally refers to a decisive shift in the proportions of migrants leaving rural and industrial areas. With the shift came a change in the social characteristics of the emigrants- rural emigrants were typically parents with young children who traveled in kinship groups (hence their characterization as "folk" migrations), while industrial emigrants were pre-dominantly young men or newly married cou- ples (Bailyn 1986).

Charlotte Erickson and William Van Vugt at- tempted to date this transition in their studies of mid-century British emigration. O n the basis of demographic and occupational data in ships' passenger lists, they argued that Britain's transition from predominantly rural to predomi-nantly industrial emigration occurred between 1831 and 1851. Erickson found that half of all British emigrants in her 1831 sample of ship lists were skilled industrial workers but that most emigrants at that time, regardless of occupation, went overseas in family groups-an indication that British emigration at that date had the characteristics of both rural and industrial migrations. In his sample of ship lists from 1851, van Vugt found that only about one-quarter of British adult male emigrants were farmers or agricultural laborers and that the proportion was even lower among the Welsh in the sample. Given the emigrants' industrial occupations and the fact that most of them were young, single men, Van Vugt concluded that Welsh emigration was "primarily industrial by 1851 ." Welsh farmers, he noted, showed "remarkable reluctance to emigrate" (Erickson 1981; Van Vugt 1985:415-416; 1991 :560, 550).

The evidence contained in the Welsh obitu-

Immigrant Trajectories 257

I

aries at once supplements and qualifies Erick- son's and Van Vugt's findings on several counts. Generally, the demographic data show that Welsh emigration from both rural and industrial places of departure fit the typical profile of family emigration. I have been able to esti- mate age at departure for 1,013 individuals or 57 percent of the obituaries in the sample (see Table 3).5 Compared to the age structure of the overall Welsh population in 1841, children are greatly under-represented in the emigrant sample while young adults are considerably over- represented. Middle-aged migrants (those between 30 and 59) are also over-represented in the obituaries; the elderly, meanwhile, appear in proportion in the general population. The weight of evidence thus indicates familial migration.

M y reconstructions of the Welsh settlements in Jackson-Gallia and in Waukesha County, Wisconsin show that the obituaries greatly under-represent the proportion of young children in these two communities. These Welsh emigrated in family groups that were, on aver-age, more mature than the families who established other rural European settlements in the nineteenth century (Knowles 1989; 1993). The lack of children in the obituaries is thus an artifact of the source; migrants apparently reported fewer deaths of children than adults to the denominational magazines. The more sur- prising feature in the obituary age data is the stability of the migrants' demographic profile over the sixty years covered by the obituaries (Table 4). Modest increases in the proportion of young adults and decreases in the proportion of those aged 30-44 (the parents in a typical family migration) probably can be attributed as much to the migration of more mature family groups as to the migration of more young adults migrating on their own. The U.S. manu-

Table 4. Estimated Age

Table 3. Estimated Age at Emigration.

Number in Sample with Calculable Age Percentage

in Welsh Age Number Percent Census, 1841

0-1 4 148 (1 4.6) 36.8 15-29 368 (36.3) 26.8 30-44 261 (25.8) 17.1 45-59 155 (1 5.3) 10.8 6 0 f 8 1 (8.0) 8.5 Totals 1.01 3 (1 001 100

Sources: Welsh immigrant obituaries; Census of Great Brit. ain (1854).

script census for rural Welsh settlements in Wisconsin and Ohio reveals that Welsh families were exceptionally mature, and that many young adults were actually adult children trav- elling to rural locations in large family groups which included matriarchs and patriarchs in their 60s and 70s (Knowles 1989; 1993). Thus the age structure of an emigrant group is not necessarily a clear indicator of a transition from rural to industrial migration during the first half of the centurv.

The impression of family or folk migration is further reinforced by the average age of the emigrants. Adult male migrants (aged 15 or olde-r) represented in the obituaries were on average 36.6 years old when they left Wales; women were 36.7 years old. And those who died in industrial locations in the United States were slightly older at departure-38.5 years for men, 39.1 years for women. This distinguishes the Welsh as an even more mature emigrant population than the English and Scottish farmers in New York and ~ d r t h Carolina on the eve of the American Revolution, whose average age of 32.4 years has been regarded as "exceptionally high" for rural immigrants (Bailyn 1986).

Each Period of Emigration.

Proportion in Each Age Class for a Given Period (percent)

Period of Emigration 0-1 4 15-29 30-44 45-59 6 0 t

1791 -1 81 9 1820-1 829 1830-1 839 1840-1 849 1850-1 853 Overall average

Sources: Welsh immigrant obituaries.

258 Knowles

Table 5. Aggregate Number and Proportion of Rural and Urban Places of Death, by Age.a

Rural Industrial and/or Urban Ocean or Unknown

Age Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent 0-1 4 7 2 (48.6) 6 7 (45.3) 9 (6.1) 15-29 185 (50.3) 170 (46.2) 13 (3.5) 30-44 137 (52.5) 11 5 (44.1) 9 (3.4) 45-59 8 5 (54.8) 6 5 (41.9) 5 (3.3 6 0 + ~ 44 (54.3) 36 (44.4) 1 (1.2) Totals 523 (51.6) 453 (44.7) 3 7 (3.7)

aN= 1,011. b ~ h eproportions in this row sum to 99.9% due to rounding. Sources: Welsh immigrant obituaries.

Other demographic analyses indicate that ment that Welsh emigration was "primarily in- the rural-industrial transition was far from com- dustrial" by mid-century (Table 6). O f the 31 7 plete by 1850. The data show middle-aged and individuals with stated occupations in the elderly emigrants were slightly more inclined ~ b i t u a r i e s , ~109 were engaged in industrial to settle in rural areas while young adults were work of some kind as compared to just 12 a bit more likely to go to industrial locations farmers. The obituaries identify more than (see Table 5). The differences in their propor- twice as many ministers as farmers! Yet the tions, however, were not clear-cut. Nor were absence of agricultural occupations from the the sex ratios of emigrants from rural and in- obituaries does not mean that farmers and farm dustrial places of departure significantly differ- laborers did not emigrate during this period. ent. The highest male-female ratio was for First, the obituaries fail to mention the occupa- those leaving Clamorganshire (1.70 males to tion of the majority of male migrants. Second, every female), but the next highest ratio given that over 76 percent of the emigrants (1.64) applied to the rural county of Montgom- departed from rural counties (Table 7) and that eryshire. Both ratios are well within the stan- over 51 percent of them died in rural places dard range for overseas family migrations (Table 5), one would expect that most of the (Bailyn 1986:224; Ostergren 1988; Swierenga unstated occupations were agricultural. Com- 1991). Overall, the sex ratio in the obituaries munity histories and the U.S. manuscript cen- remained remarkably steady from 1791 suses of 1840 and 1850 confirm that this was through 1853, fluctuating from a low of 1.2 to generally the case for rural Welsh settlements a high of 1.5. in Oh io and Wisconsin. Occupational informa-

The occupational data in the obituaries ap- tion may have been omitted from the obituar- pear, at first blush, to sustain Van Vugt's assess- ies of rural settlers because the reporters saw

Table 6. Number and Proportion of Occupations Listed in the Obituaries.

Known Date of Emiaration

Total Through 1829 1830-1 853

Occupation Number Number Percent Number Percent

Industrial, skilled Industrial, unskilled Nonindustrial craft Service or retail Professional (including clergy) Agriculture Miscellaneous Totals Sources: Welsh immigrant obituaries


Table 7. Emigration from Rural and Industrial Counties by Date of Departure.

Welsh Counties England and

the Continent

Date of departure Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Total

1,040

Notes: The places of emigration for all obituaries, including those without known date of departure, are as follows: rural, 1,353 (76.3%); industrial, 391 (22.1%); England and the Continent, 27 (1.5%); and total, 1,771. a ~ l lWelsh counties except Glamorgan and Monmouthshire. b~lamorganand Monmouthshire.

no need to state the obvious. They bothered to identify only those farmers who had achieved the status of country squires or the , ,

fame associated with founding a rural settlement.

The occupational figures do confirm the onset of industrial emigration from Wales in the 1830s. None of the evidence in the obituaries, however, indicates that industrial emigration had eclipsed rural emigration by thg early 1850s. Even in the 1840s, the period for which the obituaries best represent the important stream of Welsh Baptist emigrants from South Wales, they actually show a decrease in the proportion of departures from the two most industrialized counties, Glamorgan and Mon- mouthshire (Table 7).

Patterns of Welsh internal migration convey the sense that the transition from rural to industrial migration in Wales itself was a geo- graphically limited phenomenon up to 1850. Of the 237 obituaries that mention at least one move within Wales prior to emigration, just 40 percent identify an industrial destination in Wales. Most of those individuals migrated to the southeast iron district from a county in South Wales. And of those internal industrial migrants, fully 96 percent then emigrated directly to an industrial location in the United States, and a third of them moved subse- quently to other industrial places before they died. These figures support the notion that Welsh who had prior contact with industry were predisposed to settle in industrial locations in the United States. The data also confirm that an "industrial corridor" connected Wales and America by 1850 (Morawska 1985; W. Jones 1993).

At the same time, the obituaries convey the impression that most migrants from Cardigan- shire and North Wales had little or no contact with industry before they emigrated. Most of their short-distance internal migration re-mained within familiar rural neighborhoods. Lack of prior experience did not prevent such people from initially settling in industrial locations, however. Eleven percent of Cardigan- shire migrants in the obituaries died in Pitts- burgh, but none of them is known to have migrated previously to industrial locations in Wales. Of the ten Cardiganshire natives known to have migrated elsewhere after stopping in Pittsburgh, three died in rural Ohio, three in western cities, and four in coal mining towns in Pennsylvania.

These numbers are small, but they suggest the various permutations of Welsh migration patterns. It is misleading to categorize an individual as a rural or an industrial migrant based upon his or her circumstances at one moment in time; a very different story may emerge when we examine the trajectory of a person's entire life (Southall 1991). As Alan Conway noted in his study of Welsh immigrant letters, employment in Welsh or American industry was often a "knight's move" toward the ulti- mate goal of owning land (Conway 1973). At the same time, a rural location offering industrial employment could attract migrants who would normally be expected to settle in factory towns; the small coal mines and forges along the upper Ohio River which attracted Welsh miners and iron workers are cases in point. In our efforts to describe and explain the development of capitalism in rural areas, it may be useful to look more closely at locations, indi-

260 Know les

viduals, and groups that crossed the usual boundaries of rural and industrial identity.

A Typology of Migration Sequences

The variety of Welsh migrants' life-paths during the early nineteenth century suggest a typology of migration sequences (Figure 4). These sequences are based on recurring patterns in the obituaries and on supplemental information from a more detailed study of immigrant biographies for the Jackson-Gallia settlement, a study which links obituaries to local histories, the British and U.S. manuscript censuses, land tenure records, and genealogical sources (Knowles 1993). The typology is not meant to represent all immigrants, but rather to suggest the diverse personal geographies of immigrant experience.

Thomas J. Jones, "Cooper," exemplifies the strictly rural migrant (Type A). Jones was born on a small tenant farm near the village of Llangeitho in central Cardiganshire in 1810. His parents moved to a slightly larger tenancy during Thomas's childhood. He later worked as an agricultural laborer and carpenter on neighbor- ing farms until 1836, when he married Eliza- beth Morgan, a local woman, and moved to her father's farm. Seven years later the couple finally obtained their own eight-acre tenancy on rough grazing land several miles away. In 1848, the family and a group of neighbors emigrated directly to the rural Welsh settlement at Oak Hill, Ohio. There they stayed until 1856, when they made their final move to the prai- rielforest frontier in Blue Earth County, Minne- sota.

The life of Mary Evans illustrates the strictly industrial migrant (Type B). Mary was born in Swansea in 1770. She moved with her husband William Phillips to the iron district of Monmouthshire, where he worked at the furnaces in Blaenafon, Pen-y-Cae, and Nant-y- glo. After William died in 1830, Mary (who was then 60 years old) decided to join some of her children who had already emigrated to Amer- ica. She arrived in Carbondale, Pennsylvania in 1832 but soon migrated to Pottsville, another coal mining town, where she married Thomas Evans. Although Mary and Thomas lived

mainly in the Susquehanna Valley, she traveled frequently to visit her children elsewhere in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and southern Ohio. After moving to Coalport, Ohio in about 1840 and losing her second husband there, Mary began h;r final journey, traveling from the home of one child to another until her death in Pottsville in 1847.

The third and fourth types represent varying degrees of movement in and out of rural, urban, and industrial locations. John Lot Davies exemplifies Type C, the mixed rurallindustrial migrant. Little -is known of John's early life in the hamlet of Abermeurig, Cardiganshire, where he was born in 1787. By 1822 he was married with one child and was living in a cottage just north of the Aeron River, within an hour's walk of Abermeurig. He may have migrated seasonally to the iron district; his obituary records that he was converted to Calvinis- tic Methodism in Merthyr Tydfil in 1823. In 1841, John, his wife Ann, and their two teen- age sons emigrated to Pittsburgh where they stayed for seven years. The family migrated one last time in 1848 to Jackson County, Ohio, where John became a farmer and his eldest son became manager at a nearby charcoal iron furnace. John died in 1853, one year before his sons and other Cardiganshire immigrants or- ganized their own charcoal furnace.

The itinerant migrant, Type D, includes the greatest number and variety of moves. Welsh ministers, represented here by John T. Criffiths, best exemplify this type, but it also applies to young men who rambled through various occupations before settling down and to families whose breadwinners followed itinerant trades. Griffiths was born in the rural parish of Llan- sawel, Carmarthenshire in 1808. At 14 he moved to the market town of Carmarthen, where he lived with an uncle and worked as secretary in a notary's office. By 1829 he had taken up the post of school teacher in ~stradg~nlais,a n industrial village on the Cla- morgan-Breconshire border. There he con-verted to Calvinistic Methodism and was in-spired to preach. His itinerant career began in 1833 in the rural hamlet of Ystradfellte. He then moved to Dowlais in the heart of the iron district, where he wed Susannah Morgans in 1836. They emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1841 and followed John's callings to a succession of Welsh industrial communities, including Potts-

lmm igrant Trajectories 261

Type A: Rural migration Thomas J. Jones, "Cooper"

Rural 1 -( (I 8

I

Industrial , TownlCity 1 1

Type B: Industrial migration Mary Evans

Type C: Mixed rurallindustrial migration John Lot Davies

TownlCity I 1

Type D: Itinerant migration Rev. John T. Griffiths

LEGEND Birthldeath New farm Joins church

Emigration Change in occupation Marries

) Move, date uncertain CITSZ3 Period of local mobility Spouse's death

Rural

Industrial

TownlCity

Figure 4. Typology of migration sequences. Although the exact sequence of events in each migrant's life was unique, certain patterns of movement do emerge from the data as indicated by the types and frequencies of movement shown in these four examples.

8

1

ville and Danville. He also ministered briefly in Utica, New York, the rural heartland of Welsh immigration.

The obituaries alone do not provide a sufficient basis upon which to determine the pre- vailing migrant types at any given time or for any particular sending or receiving region. Types A and B were probably most common, but Types C and D, even if a small minority, could have had significant impact as carriers of information, technological know-how, and urban savvy. Their circulation between country and city, and between farm and factory, would help explain Welsh immigrants' involvement in rural industrialization in places such as southern Ohio.

Rethinking Transitions

In this essay I have used the biographical information contained in Welsh immigrant obituaries to draw the main contours of Welsh- American immigration during the first half of the nineteenth century and to analyze the significance of the geographical patterns and social characteristics that those biographies reveal. This methodology may prove useful for other immigrant groups who are not well documented in official sources. More generally, using obituaries and other biographical sources to reconstruct individual migrants' life- paths and experiences can illuminate dark corners in migration history by bringing to light the spatial and social context of migrants' decisions and by delineating complex personal geographies that reveal the workings of major societal transitions. Biographical databases also can be cross-linked to a wealth of individual- level data from other sources, both qualitative and quantitative, enabling detailed examination of particular people, places, and groups within the context of a regional or national study.

The word "transition," like "transformation" and other words commonly used to refer to major changes in social and economic rela-tions, tends to reinforce our proclivity to think of history as "a succession of stable states sepa- rated by revolutionary transitions" (Hoppe and Langton 1992:2) or, to borrow a phrase from evolutionary theory, as a punctuated equilib- rium. It becomes more difficult to speak of a transition, however, when the phenomenon under study does not take place at a particular

moment frozen in time (Braudel 1986), but rather unfolds in a variety of sequences. This study of Welsh migration sequences discerns a strong rural component up to the early 1850s. Dudley Baines thought that the transition to industrial migration was not complete until 1891 (Baines 1985), while Erickson and Van Vugt placed it between 1831 and 1851. Each of us looked at the same phenomenon through the lens of a different source. Our combined research shows that the rural-industrial transition continued to be an important feature of Welsh-American migration throughout the nineteenth century.

Kathleen Neils Conzen recently proposed that immigration historians should rethink the metaphors they use to describe immigrant adaptation to American society. Rather than the crucible or the melting pot, the salad or the smorgasbord, she suggested that we think of the process of adaptation as a braided river, "where there is a main channel, to be sure," but where the diversity of immigrant responses to new environments also created many "side channels that flow with it [the mainstream] through time and space, moving in the same direction, constrained by the same bluffs on either side of the broad valley, borne along by the same deep currents and mingling their wa- ters at floodtime" (Conzen 1991 :I6).

The image of braided streams is even more appropriate to the process of migration. As the obituaries show, not all Welsh migrants trav- elled in strictly confined channels. Those who, figuratively speaking, jumped the banks and mingled in various social and economic con- texts may in fact have been important catalysts in immigrant society. The extent of immigrant movement between agriculture and industry warrants further study, particularly in the context of the early stages of capitalist development in rural areas. Studies of rural capitalist "transformation" have, until now, focused on the conflicting values of rural people rooted in place and of the outsiders (capitalist farmers and industrialists) whose coming constituted a kind of economic invasion (see, for example, Hahn and Prude 1985). In many places this scenario undoubtedly transpired. But in other places, particularly where conflict was less visible, the thrust for change may have come from within rural society itself. Among early nineteenth-century communities, both in Europe and in the United States, the impact of

263 Immigran t Trajectories

those hybrids w h o m o v e d back and forth between industrial and rural locations may ex-plain aspects o f rural change that are n o t accounted for b y invasive capitalist efforts t o i m - prove agricultural product ivi ty o r t o develop rural industry. In those side channels traced b y the life-paths o f seasonal migrants and those w h o experienced the personal revolut ion of overseas immigration may lie a n e w apprecia- t ion o f the historical geography o f capitalist development.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the National Welsh American Foundation; the Welsh National Gymanfa Ganu Association; and HTV and the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Stud- ies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, whose grants helped fund this research. Thanks also for the helpful comments of Robert C. Ostergren, Lawrence M . Knowles, John Walton, the reviewers, and members of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (who heard an earlier version of this essay). Special thanks to Allan G. Bogue and Kathleen Neils Conzen for formative early discus- sions of this research. I am also grateful to Sara Arscott for her help in producing and designing the maps and to Adam Cooper for Figure 4.

Notes

1. Frank Thistlethwaite first argued for a regional ap- proach to immigration in his essay "Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" (1960). Outstanding examples of geographical analysis of nineteenth-century trans-At- lantic migration include Ostergren's A Community Transplanted (1988) and Morawska's For Bread with Butter (1985). Lucassen's Migrant Labour in Europe, 1600-1900 (1 987) offers a fine example of geographical analysis of internal migration.

2. Recent case studies by W. Jones (1993) and H. Davies (1991; 1995) have gone a long way in reducing this deficit for urban Welsh in the late eighteenth century and industrial Welsh in the late nineteenth century. Rural Welsh settlements have received less attention, and no general survey has reappraised Welsh-American immigration since Berthoff (1 953), Conway (1 961; 1973), Maldwyn Jones (1973), and David Williams (19751, although Trosset (1993) addresses interesting cultural themes.

3. Enclosures were successful at Rhoshirwaun, Llan- debrog, and Aberdaron. At Nefyn, a negligent commissioner failed to implement enclosure until at least 1833 (Dodd 1971 ).

4. Jones first thought the Welsh could find inde-pendence on the American frontier, but he became discouraged by immigrants'assimilation into

American culture. He finally settled on a remote section of desert in Patagonia, where several Welsh-Argentinian communities are still known as y wladfa today. Llanbrynmair's Congregational minister, Samuel Roberts, tried to set up a Welsh colony in the Tennessee woods in the 1860s but failed miserably due to lack of funds and his un- derestimation of Welsh opposition to slavery (G. Williams 1975; Shepperson 1961 ).

5. Where the obituary records the immigrant's age at death and date of emigration, I used those figures to calculate an exact age at emigration. Where the contents of the obituary clearly indicated the person's age category at emigration, I entered the category. No uncertain ages were used.

6. Less than 40 percent of men's obituaries mention occupation. Most of the ministers and relatives who wrote the obituaries were religious Calvinists who were more concerned with reporting on the deceased person's state of grace than on the secu- lar events in his or her life.

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Submitted 1/94, Revised 8/94, Accepted 9/94

266 Knowles

Knowles, Anne Kelly. 1995, Immigrant Trajectories through the Rural-Industrial Transition in Wales and the United States, 1795-1850. Annals o f the Association o f American Geographers 85(2):246-266. Abstract.

This essay offers the first detailed geographical analysis of Welsh emigration and settlement in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. The analysis is based upon the wealth of geographical and historical information contained in 1,771 immigrant obituaries. They show that Welsh emigration was a predominantly rural phenomenon up to mid-century, although emigration from industrial South Wales had begun by 1830 and important industrial settlements were well-established in the States by 1850. These data also reveal distinctive regional historical geographies of emigration. The second half of the essay compares the spatial and social characteristics of rural and industrial migration by tracing patterns of internal migration in Wales and the United States and by examining the life-paths of four individual migrants. This evidence suggests that many rural Welsh had some contact with industry and that their transition from an agricultural to an industrial way of life was more complex and prolonged than other studies have shown. In conclusion, the essay points to the need for further study of the rural-industrial transition as a key aspect of the development of capitalism in rural places. Key Words: historical geography of migration, obituaries as source, rural-industrial transition, Welsh migration.

Correspondence: Institute of Earth Studies, Llandinam Building, University of Wales, Ab-erystwyth, Dyfed SY23 3DB, Wales, United Kingdom.

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