Who is connected, and how.

The numbers

One town's disproportionate share.

The Great Migration of 1620 to 1640 is estimated to have carried roughly 20,000 people from England to New England, most after 1630. Religious pressure was one of several reasons for migration; William Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633.

Boston 400's research into documented migration records identifies 166 individuals from the Boston area of Lincolnshire who migrated to New England between 1620 and 1640. This represents approximately 65% of the 256 identified Lincolnshire migrants in that research, not a count of everyone who emigrated. Its Boston-area figures include 21 people in the Winthrop Fleet of 1630 and 47 in John Cotton's sailing of 1633.

The context was not only religious. Charles I's Forced Loan of 1626 put men who refused to pay it in prison, and the 'Boston Men' who resisted became central to the Massachusetts Bay Company — an enterprise that began as a for-profit venture before it became a refuge.

Where to look

The records that still exist.

Genealogy is the most common reason people write to us, and the good news is that a great deal survives on both shores. The bad news is that it is scattered across institutions that do not talk to one another.

Start with the compiled work. The New England Historic Genealogical Society's Great Migration Directory and the Great Migration Study Project have already documented most identifiable migrants of 1620–1640, including their English origins where they can be proved.

• Great Migration Directory and AmericanAncestors.org — New England Historic Genealogical Society.
• The Winthrop Fleet and the works of Charles Edward Banks — the starting point for 1630 sailings.
• Boston parish and borough records, and the Lincolnshire Archives, for the English side.
• The Massachusetts Historical Society and the Boston Athenaeum for colonial and civic records.
• The 1881 and later censuses, burial grounds and probate for the Massachusetts side.

A proven line is rare and a plausible one is common. We will never present a family tradition as a documented fact — if we help you find a record, we will show you the record.

What we want to build

A register, not a reunion.

We are assembling a simple, voluntary register of people on both shores who have a documented or family-tradition connection to the other Boston: descendants, residents with relatives across the water, and families who simply want the story told to their children.

From that register we hope to run a small matching service — a Lincolnshire family hosting a Massachusetts cousin, a school class on one side corresponding with one on the other, a descendant invited to speak at an anniversary event.

It is deliberately modest. A register that nobody maintains is worse than none, so we would rather start with a hundred serious entries than ten thousand names collected once and never used.

The honest caveat

Not everyone can claim this.

The 1630 founding families are not the only families with a claim on either Boston, and for most residents the more meaningful connection is to the people who came later: the Irish and French Canadian arrivals of the nineteenth century, the Jewish and Italian communities, the Polish and Lithuanian families who transformed Boston, Lincolnshire in the twentieth, and the communities from across the world who live in the Borough today.

A twinning that only celebrates one bloodline is a club, not a bridge. We will say so at every event we organise.