Mississippians in the Northeast

We all know that most Mississippians migrated West when they left the state, but I was a little curious about the number who moved in an unexpected direction--Northeast. I decided to do a little more number crunching with the 1880 census using Ancestry.com.

Maine - 166
New Hampshire - 36
Vermont - 24
Massachusetts - 187
Rhode Island - 21
Connecticut - 45
New York - 498
Delaware - 6
New Jersey - 106
Pennsylvania - 289

These are definitely smaller numbers than we have for those heading West. What made these folks move north? I suspect some of them are descendants of northerners who actually owned many of the plantations in the state of Mississippi. They may have actually been born on a "visit" to the state or while some of their parents wintered in the state. Others may have fled north because of repercussions of their Union sympathies in the Civil War. There are probably a few other reasons for the northern movement as well. I will try to take a closer look at the native Mississippi residents of some of the states with more manageable numbers as I have time to research them.

Mississippians in Texas

After my last post, someone asked me how many native Mississippians were in Texas by 1900. I decided to do it for each census year from 1850-1930 (except 1890 since all we have extant are some veterans schedules).

1850 - 6362
1860 - 19,929
1870 - 41,239
1880 - 61,703
1900 - 89,831
1910 - 86,356
1920 - 80,980
1930 - 45,287

It is interesting to note the decline in the 20th century. Most of the migration to Texas had already taken place so there were more "native Texans" from those Mississippians who had "GTT" (Gone To Texas) by that time.

Mississippians in the West

I got this idea from a post on the Association of Professional Genealogists listserv where a person was talking about persons in a specific location in Montana who were from the state of Maine. I thought it would be interesting to see how many persons born in the state of Mississippi were in various Western states (and Plains States) at the time of the 1880 census. Using the search engine at Ancestry.com these are the results I came up with:

Arizona - 94
California - 1329
Dakota Territory - 65
Colorado - 488
Idaho - 61
Kansas - 3451
Nebraska - 370
Nevada - 51
New Mexico - 70
Oregon - 147
Utah - 152
Washington - 52
Wyoming - 44

And . . . for the record . . . there were 61,703 Mississippians in Texas.