Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Early British Mormon Emigrants

A question arose on an LDS website about the concentration of emigrants from northern vs. southern England, so I quickly made the following using data from the website Early LDS. As I understand it, the database would just show the Nauvoo-era emigrants, so just those who were in America by 1846. It is not a particularly elegant database, but I can't think of any other site which provides similar data.

This is a Creative Commons 1851 map of English counties.


Yellow shows the lowest concentration, followed by orange, red, purple, blue, and green. The counties of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Lancashire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire had the highest number of converts emigrating to Nauvoo. Wales, Ireland, and Scotland had similar numbers, but I did not break them down by county.

Other counties of note with higher concentrations of emigrants include Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Cheshire and Lincolnshire.


A couple of notes about the shortcomings of this map:

1) There is not a single county without at least a handful of emigrants, but some of the emigrants may have been born in those places but joined the Church in London, Manchester, Birmingham, or Canada, which could skew the data.

2) I know there were significant early missionary efforts in London, because I have a variety of ancestors who joined the Church there in the early days. And of course, there is also Susannah Mehitable Rogers Sangiovanni [Pickett Keate] who joined the Church in London in 1840 due to the missionary work of Wilford Woodruff, Heber C. Kimball, and Parley P. Pratt. Even though many converts joined the Church in the 1830s and 1840s, many didn’t emigrate until the 1850s or 1860s, and some left their native land as late as the 1880s, so they wouldn’t show up on the map.

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