'A Family Affair': Colonising New Kincardineshire
Personal persuasion and the hope of maintaining a Scottish identity encouraged emigrants to a better life in 1870s Canada - but their experiences on arrival were far from Utopian.
The nineteenth century was the great 'age of emigration', a time when vast numbers of people from all over Europe were aroused, often by poverty or lack of opportunity at home, to take advantage of the revolution in exploration and transport to populate new regions of the world. Scotland played a significant part in the exodus, sending out a total of 641,405 emigrants between 1830 and 1880. The most common view of this movement is that it was a vast outpouring of paupers, particularly from the High- lands, but in fact it affected every region of Scotland and by no means all the participants were destitute or desperate.
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