East Jersey Bound: Scots migrants to America in the 1680s

Speaker: Derrick Johnstone, Research Affiliate, Department of History, University of Glasgow This talk was given on 28 April at 5:30pm via Zoom. In the early 1680s, several hundred Scots emigrated from Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Montrose to establish colonial settlements in New Jersey. This was backed at the highest level and sought to ensure that Scotland had a stake in the development of the American colonies. It brought together Quakers, Episcopalians and Presbyterians, a tense mix of religious affiliations. Many of the Presbyterians were transported Covenanters and the Quakers too had had their share of persecution. In this talk Derrick Johnston set out the background to the venture and considered the questions: Who were the immigrants, why did they leave and what became of them? Derrick introduced his website East Jersey Bound https://eastjerseybound.scot/ and reflected on some of the challenges in conducting micro-historical research for this period of time, drawing on sources in the National Records of Scotland and New Jersey State Archives. The site contains a genealogical database of 600 emigrants and over 2,200 of their kin and associates. Biography Derrick Johnstone is a Research Affiliate in the Department of History at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He completed his dissertation on the Scots emigrants in 2025 and has published research on the Sweet Singers, an extreme Covenanter sect. He has been a member of the Scottish Genealogical Society for 10 years and is Secretary of the Old Edinburgh Club, the city’s history society.