THE INCREASE, DIFFUSION, AND 

 DECLINE OF THE MAYFLOWER AND 

 OTHER NEW ENGLAND STOCK 



Present Number of Living Mayflower Descendants Estimated at 85,000. 



J. Gardner Bartlett 



New England Historic Genealogical Society 

 Boston, Mass. 



THE article in last November's 

 niunber of this magazine by S. J. 

 Holmes and C. M. Doud entitled 

 "The Approaching Extinction 

 of the Mayflower Descendants" has 

 aroused wide interest. While the fall- 

 ing birth rate during the last seventy- 

 five years among the New England 

 stock has been deplorable, the present 

 conditions are not quite so desperate as 

 pictured by Messrs. Holmes and Doud, 

 as their conclusions were based on far 

 too small a field of data. 



The early history of New England, 

 the genealogies of its families, the 

 increase and diffusion of the stock 

 throughout the whole country, the 

 decline in its birth rate during the last 

 two generations, and the amount and 

 effect of foreign immigration since 

 1845 have been subjects of much inter- 

 est to the writer for twenty years. 



About 25,000 English colonists set- 

 tled New England between 1620 and 

 1643 (over 20,000 coming between 1630 

 and 1640), after which general immi- 

 gration ceased until after 1790, except 

 for about 8,000 Scotch-Irish immigrants 

 who came here between 1715 and 1750. 

 The total population of New England in 

 1650 was about 33,000. Colonial cen- 

 suses and study of vital records in 

 thousands of families in New England 

 genealogies establish that this old stock 

 doubled in population about every 28 

 years, which give the following data on 



Population of New England Stock 



1650 33,000 



1678 66,000 



1706 132,000 



1734 275,000 



1762 560,000 



1790 1,125,000 



(The Scotch-Irish immigration, 1715- 

 1750, is the cause of a little more than 

 doubling in the figures of 1734 and 

 1762.) 



According to the United States Cen- 

 sus of 1790, the population of New Eng- 

 land was 1,009,000; but at that time at 

 least 115,000 persons of New England 

 origin were living outside New England, 

 mainly in New York, New Jersey and 

 Pennsylvania. So of the nearly 4,000, 

 000 total population of the United States 

 in 1790. about 1,125,000, or about 28%, 

 were of the old New England stock, 

 which continued to double about every 

 twenty-eight years until about 1845. 

 Its birth rate then commenced to fall, 

 so about forty years elapsed before the 

 population of this stock had again 

 doubled about 1885; and since then a 

 further fall in birth rate has resulted in 

 thirty-four years in an increase of 

 hardly 25% in this stock in 1919 over 

 what it was in 1885. 



United States Censuses, immigration 

 statistics, and the preceding figures on 

 New England stock, show how the lat- 

 ter has steadily decreased in its percent- 

 age in the total population of the coun- 

 try since 1790. 



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