Talk Elections

looking at findagrave and tracing the genealogy of people - I've noticed that some areas of the south were settled by people from outside the south. Like I see a lot of people who were born in Pennsylvania and then died in VA and NC. Is there some story behind that? I think the area now called US-11 may have actually been the route they took to settle.

Great Appalachian Valley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Appalachian_Valley)

It's hard to pull a an ox-drawn wagon over mountains on unprepared roads. Coming down is even more treacherous. A runaway wagon ends up with all your possessions and a pile of firewood. If you are lucky, you still have a horse.

As the wikipedia article notes, there is a gap on the east side in Pennsylvania that allows entry, and then exits via the Cumberland Gap into Tennessee and Kentucky, and also into the Piedmont area of North Carolina.

I'm no expert on this subject, but I can think of two examples of migration from north to south.

The first was during the 18th century, when some Scotch-Irish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-Irish_Americans) migrated south from Pennsylvania into the Southern backcountry. IIRC the ancestors of Sam Houston and James K. Polk both came from Ulster (northern Ireland) by way of Pennsylvania.

The second was during Reconstruction, by "carpetbaggers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpetbagger)."

The "Scotch-Irish" (Ulster-Scots) are so overrated/overhyped. Another negative contribution from neo-Confederate Jim Webb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wagon_Road

They still show up politically as the most Republican parts of VA and NC

What does it mean to refer to an ethnic group as "overrated"?

Also, I like to keep in mind that Colonial South Carolina had French Hugenots and German Protestants come here. Newberry County is the only county in the South that is over 10% Lutheran as a result of all Germans who came here and I live in the "Dutch" Fork area.

What does this even mean?

Substantial numbers of Swiss (and later German) migrants moved initially to Knoxville, TN before finding their way into the then-isolated Cumberland Plateau and beyond; in some of these places, they were the first to settle the areas. This is why you have cities like Gruetli-Laager and Hohenwald throughout eastern and central TN. These areas (counties like Van Buren, Grundy, Warren & Lewis, Perry and Hickman) also tended to be among the last-remaining white rural Democratic regions in the state.

Their influence or impact on history and/or culture.  And yes there is a fair amount of mythologizing about the Scot-Irish (I am about 40% Scot-Irish though most likely from the English side of the border)

Back to original OP, it my understanding that an inordinate number of Catholics of the French, Spanish, Italian and even Irish kind ended up in Louisiana. 

There's always some places that are kind of a weird draw - I'm the descendant of Illinoisians and Ohioans who moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, probably because Hot Springs has always been a very weird place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Springs,_Arkansas#Gangsters_and_illegal_gambling).  (Their descendants later moved to Detroit because why not.)

A number of Italians ended up in the Delta in Mississippi and Arkansas.

A lot of those names on the list, are also Civil War battle sites.

The rivers were a similar story, they impeded traffic across them, but served as highways inland and through these mountain valleys.

Virginia's Shenandoah Valley has a huge number of Pennsylvania Dutch. German Moravian settlers immigrated heavily into North Carolina.

Let's not forget the Acadians in Louisiana and the Mexicans in south (like Laredo), central Texas (like San Antonio), and west (El Paso). OK, El Paso is in no way Southern -- and Texas is losing much of its old Southern character as has Virginia. 

East Texas has always been deep southern, the area right next to slave holding LA. In 1992, Bill Clinton dominated in East Texas. Democrats today get absolutely wiped out there now sadly.

You mean Florida?

Germans in the Texas Hill Country.

There's a notable Chinese immigrant population in the Mississippi Delta (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/lens/mississippi-delta-chinese-americans.html) that has been present since the 1860s, so much so that the largest cities in the Mississippi Delta (i.e., Clarksdale, Greenville) had separate classes in public schools for Chinese students as recently as the 1950s.

I've been wanting to do more research on this, but the 1991 Mira Nair film Mississippi Masala (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Masala) depicts the Delta as a destination for several Ugandan Indian families following their expulsion by Idi Aman in 1971 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Asians_from_Uganda).  Even if it was only a few families, it would still be somewhat historically significant.