Search billions of records on   MacDonald-Bates Families  Ours
is an old Canadian family. My children's grandparents descended
from pioneers who were settled on Canada's east coast many years
before there was a Canada, as we know it. "The Great Migration"
(Europeans to America, and Australia & New Zealand) occurred in
the last years of a travel facility that today we would say had
hardly existed. There were no airlines in those old days, no
rail services, buses or cars. People walked or rode an animal or
animal-drawn vehicle; and then in peril--law and order hardly
existed outside of settled communities. Most people spent their
entire lives within a single village. They were born there, grew
up there, married there, raised children there, and died there.
Rail traffic would change that, but rail traffic would not
arrive until the very latest stages of The Great Migration and
had no influence on it.  What overcame large numbers of these
settled farm and village folk that they would move to absolutely
strange l