Where does your family come from? Finding the migrations in your family tree
Sooner or later, every long family dinner arrives at the same question: so where do we actually come from? The answer is almost never one place. Scratch any family in Britain, Ireland, the United States or Australia and a journey appears: a great-grandfather who left a farm that could no longer feed him, a grandmother who arrived on a ship with one suitcase, an uncle who went "for a couple of years" and stayed forty.
This is about those journeys: the great migrations that almost certainly passed through your family, the traces they leave behind, and how to find yours with three questions and a map.
A family is, nearly always, a decision to leave
Families remember themselves in places — the village, the street, the town "we've always been from". But looked at calmly, most family histories come down to one or two people who decided to go. Everything else — the surnames that mixed, the city you were born in, your grandmother's accent — follows from that decision.
Which is why "where do we come from?" isn't answered with a place. It's answered with a route. And in most English-speaking families, that route runs through one of these migrations.
1. Leaving for America (1820–1920)
In the century before the First World War, some ten million people left Britain and around four and a half million left Ireland, most of them for the United States, Canada and Australia. The Irish exodus was driven by the Famine of the 1840s, when roughly a million people died and another million left within a decade; the British one by wages, land and the simple fact that a ticket to New York had become affordable. Between 1892 and 1954 the inspection station at Ellis Island alone processed some twelve million arrivals — Irish, Italian, German, Polish, Jewish, Scandinavian — and its passenger records are searchable online for free.
If your family has an Irish surname in Boston, a Welsh one in Pennsylvania or a Scottish one in Ontario, this is your migration. And if there is a studio portrait in the shoebox with a painted backdrop and a suit too heavy for the climate, it dates from this era.
2. The Great Migration (1916–1970)
The largest migration in American history crossed no border. Over half a century, about six million African Americans left the rural South for the cities of the North, Midwest and West — Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles — fleeing segregation and looking for factory work. Whole neighbourhoods, churches and musical traditions moved with them. If your grandparents were born in Mississippi or Alabama and your parents in Chicago, this is the journey in your tree — and one of the best documented, because the people who made it are, in many families, still alive to tell it.
3. The Windrush generation (1948–1971)
In June 1948 the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury with several hundred passengers from the Caribbean, invited to help rebuild post-war Britain. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands followed from Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and beyond, to work in the NHS, on the buses and the railways. Their children and grandchildren are British in every sense, and their family trees have a branch on an island most of them visit rarely and think about often. The passenger lists survive at the National Archives; the stories survive at the kitchen table.
4. Ten pounds to the other side of the world (1945–1972)
After the war, Australia offered assisted passage — the famous ten-pound fare — and more than a million Britons took it, along with large numbers of Italians, Greeks, Dutch and Maltese. Families sold up, boarded a ship for six weeks and arrived somewhere with a different sky. Many never came back; some came back and left again. If you have Australian cousins you've never met, this is probably why.
5. The migrations still happening
And the journeys that haven't finished: Poles, Romanians and Lithuanians in Britain since 2004; Mexicans, Indians and Filipinos in the United States; families split by a visa, a job, a marriage across an ocean. For these families shared memory is more fragile than for any other, because the ones who left and the ones who stayed remember different versions of the same story. Putting those versions side by side is exactly what a family tree is for.
The traces a journey leaves
A migration leaves very specific clues. If you know what to look for, they turn up:
- The photo with the wrong background. The painted palm tree, the winter coat in a hot country, the car with a foreign plate. Nearly every family has one.
- The letter. Families that were separated wrote. If a single letter survives, it carries a date, a sender and an address — three facts that place a person in a year and a town.
- The ship record. Passenger lists for the Atlantic crossings exist and are largely digitised: the Ellis Island database for arrivals in New York, the National Archives' outward passenger lists for departures from Britain, and their Australian and Canadian equivalents.
- The name that changed. The Giuseppe who became Joseph, the Schmidt who became Smith, the surname that lost a letter at a desk in a port. Two different spellings on two documents usually mark the exact moment of arrival.
- The recipe, the word, the habit. The dish only your family makes, the word nobody else in your town uses. These are the oldest traces — and the least often written down.
Three questions that find your migration
You don't need an archive. You need a long dinner and three questions — the same ones that open any conversation with your grandparents:
- Where was your mother born? And hers? Two generations back, a place that isn't yours almost always appears.
- Why did they leave? Work, war, a marriage, a debt, a brother who was already there. The reason is the story; the place is just the data.
- Who stayed behind? The branch that never moved is the one that kept the photos, the graves and the papers. Finding it is, very often, finding half the tree.
Write the answers down with a name, a place and an approximate year. That's a journey.
Drawing the journey on a map
This is where a family tree stops being a list and becomes a story. In Familión, every person's profile holds a birthplace and their moves — "moves to Boston, 1929" — and two things follow: the timeline puts each journey in its year, and the Map places every person, with their face, where they last lived (or where they were born, if no moves are recorded).
Look at the demo family's map: Joaquín leaves Granada for Havana in 1921, his son's family moves on to Madrid in 1972, a grandson settles in Berlin, a great-granddaughter in Paris and her brother in Los Angeles — six countries, five generations, one tree — and at a glance you understand why that family celebrates birthdays across three time zones. Your family has a map like it. It just needs the places filled in.
Frequently asked questions
How do I find out where my family comes from?
Start with your grandparents' and great-grandparents' birthplaces: within two generations a place that isn't yours almost always appears. Then ask why they left and who stayed, and look for the traces — photos, letters, passenger lists — that confirm the journey.
Where can I search passenger lists for emigrant ships?
For arrivals in New York, the Ellis Island database (free, online). For departures from Britain, the National Archives' outward passenger lists (1890–1960). Canada and Australia hold their own arrival records, also searchable online.
How many people left Britain and Ireland for America?
In the century before 1914, roughly ten million left Britain and four and a half million left Ireland, most for the United States, Canada and Australia. Ellis Island alone processed about twelve million arrivals between 1892 and 1954.
How do you show a migration in a family tree?
With each person's birthplace and their dated moves. In Familión those two facts draw the journey's timeline and the family map on their own, with every person placed where they last lived.
Where does your family come from? Give each person a place and see the map it draws — free, at familion.app.