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The Great Migration

What was the great migration?

What Was The Great Migration?

According to the US National Archives, the Great Migration was one of the largest movements of people in United States history. From 1910 to the 1970s, about six million African-Americans moved out of the southern states to avoid racial violence and prejudice. They moved to areas in the north, mid-west and western United States in 2 phases. The first phase (1910-1940), primarily saw people move to New York, Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh. With the onset of World War II, the nations defense industry grew quite a bit bringing job opportunities for African-Americans in other regions, including major cities in California (Oakland, Los Angeles and San Francisco); Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington.

African American History

Learn more about African American History with an extensive list of resources. Click here to learn more.

Great Migration Interactive Maps

One way to appreciate the historical significance and impacts of these migrations is to see how it impacted your family. This is where Map My Cousins comes in, which is discussed in the next section. But, before we get there - lets cover a few resources that do a good job of illustrating and documenting the migration patterns that occurred during the Great Migration. The “ Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series ” has a great migration map to start with. This has an interactive map that shows migrations by time period in a way that very naturally lines up with time periods for your family’s migrations in Map My Cousins . If you want even more detail, James Gregory conducted extensive research on migration patterns and the movement of people during the Great Migration. This is documented, along with a collection of interactive migration maps on the University of Washington website (“Mapping the Great Migration (African American)” by James Gregory) . These interactive maps provide detailed information by decade, region and city about the movement of African Americans from the South to northern and western states.

The Great Migration And Your Family

If your family was part of the Great Migration, you can use Map My Cousins (which is free) to see how your families migrations aligned with the primary movements during the same time period Map My Cousins is a unique application that allows you to see information about where your family came from on a world map, with several different types of maps to chose from. With Map My Cousins, you can: • See all major events from your family tree on a world map including: births, residence, immigration, burial & more. • FamilySearch Integration: Load your family tree directly from FamilySearch, including the locations you’ve recorded for their births, residence, burial and more. • Get to know the area your family lived: Search for & explore nearby addresses, points of interest, cities. • Drill down into regions, towns, neighborhoods and streets: Discover points of interest near where your family lived. • Find organizations that can help with your genealogy research including: local / regional government offices & churches that may have vital records or knowledge of the area, local genealogy organizations and translators. • Browse historic maps From any map, browse a collection of historic maps or click on a family marker in the Migration Map By Generation to jump to a specific location in a historic map

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Works off of the data already in your favorite family

tree software.

To Get Started With Map My Cousins…

To use Map My Cousins, follow these steps: 1) Log into FamilySearch.org and fill out as much information as you can on your ancestors and cousins. If this is your first time using FamilySearch, you may want to read their How To Guide. 2) For each family member, be sure to fill in where they were born, where they lived, where they were married, where they died and where they are buried (along with properly formatted dates). 3) Bring up Map My Cousins and fill out the options to download your information from familysearch. 4) Use the menu options to see your ancestors on several different map types, including a migration map by generation, an animated map and a cluster summary map. Documenting Your Family Story: Sharing Historic Events Through Your Family’s Eyes There is a lot more to your family story than what appears on a family tree or on a map. Documenting how historic events impacted your family can often only be told by putting pen to paper and writing your family story. To help start you on this this journey, you should first read our Article: “Telling Your Family Story”. This includes writing tips and pointers on how to develop the content. Here are a few questions you can ask your family members to understand the impacts of major historical events through first hand accounts: 1) Where were your parents and grandparents born? 2) If they lived in the south, how did racism impact their lives? 3) If they moved out of the south, how did they pick where they were moving to? a) How did they get there? b) Did they find racism to be less extensive and pervasive in their new homes? 4) How can I learn more about cousins of my generation, what they do, where they live?