Migration in Colonial America: Evidence from the Militia Muster Rolls

Abstract

The diversity of opinions about the extent and importance of migration during the colonial era testifies to the paucity of direct information on the subject. Beyond the desire for a purely demographic explanation of the differences in regional rates of population growth, the need for a better understanding of the changes in the supply and distribution of labor before the Industrial Revolution has spurred recent research on internal migration. Some of this work has grown out of studies of the censuses and vital records of various New England towns (such as those cited in Jones, 1981). However, although these sources testify that an individual existed in a specific place and time, and thus provide valuable indirect glimpses of migration, they rarely furnish the information necessary to locate him or her a second time—either earlier or later in the life cycle. Names appear and disappear from such lists over time, but several intervening assumptions are required before we can infer that migration was involved. Similarly, although differences in sex ratios and age distributions reflect the movement of population, they reveal little about the absolute magnitude or direction of net migration, let alone gross flows.