Migration patterns, and a little about Neilie Spencer
If you were to draw a map of the migration of my Spencer ancestors from those early settlers in 17th-century coastal Virginia, you would draw a line westward across Virginia, then eventually into Kentucky and finally to Bartholomew County, Indiana. On my mother's side (the Pittmans), the line would start with Quaker settlers in New Jersey, then move across southern Pennsylvania (stopping for a generation or so in Bedford County, near the Maryland border), then into northwestern Ohio for a generation, and finally to Brown County, Indiana. These two lines would intersect at last in the town of Columbus, Indiana, where my Mom and Dad went to high school. The lines would get pretty messy after that. In the 20th-century the time between moves shortened a great deal, and the direction in which people moved began to vary. Where people once spent at least a generation and often many generations in the same place, by the mid-20th-century people were moving numerous times in a single lifetim...