Kinship migration to northwestern Virginia, 1785–1815: The myth of the Southern frontiersman.

For nearly 100 years American historians, with few exceptions, have maintained that migration of colonists to the trans-Appalachian frontier was a communal experience for those from New England and Northern regions but that the Southern frontiersman represented a non-communal, individualistic spirit of colonization. This dissertation traces the migration and settlement patterns of the earliest colonists along the northwestern Virginia frontier, the area organized as Wood County in 1799, from three Eastern regions, New England, the Middle Atlantic, and the Northern Neck of Virginia. It determines that emigrants from all regions migrated cohesively and sequentially in large kinship/neighbor groups and that their settlement behaviors were remarkably similar. It challenges the myth of the individualistic Southern frontiersman