Glengarry County, Ontario
Canada
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James Hunter, in A Dance Called America picks up on the Earl of Selkirk's observation that emigrants from particular localities tended to cluster in the same areas in the New World (this is part of the statistical analysis we hope to do as this project develops) and notes that,
'the bulk of the earliest European settlers in this part of Ontario were to come from the district bounded on the south by the narrow waters of Loch Shiel, on the east by the Great Glen and on the north by the high mountains of Kintail.'
Many of the early settlers in Glengarry were from the MacDonell party who sailed to New York on the Pearl in 1773 and took up land on Sir John Johnson's Kingsborough patent. Dispossessed of their lands for fighting on the side of the Crown in the American Revolutionary War (largely in the King's Royal Regiment of New York and the 84th, Royal Highland Emigrants Regiment), they went north and were given land grants in Glengarry County. If you are searching for these, look under Mohawk Valley as destination as this was their first permanent place of settlement.
A further group of emigrants who left Scotland in 1785 and arrived in Glengarry via the United States. A further group of around five hundred Highlanders, largely MacDonalds and MacDonnells, led by their priest, Father Alexander MacDonnell, arrived directly from Scotland that same year. 1802 saw three ships, the Friends, Jane and Helen bring three hundred more from Lochaber, around a third of whom were MacMillans from Loch Arkaig. By 1830, three quarters of Glengarry's population of eight and half thousand or so were of Highland descent and an emigration pamphlet of the time cautioned 'Go not to Glengarry if you be not a Highlandman.'
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