Leaving Appalachia...

[??????????]

Baltimore/DC/Richmond areas seem like the most likely destinations to me.

Correct. That's were all the coal miners in my family went to.

[opebo]

Upward mobility is so sad?

Well of course 'upward mobility' has nothing whatever to do with the migration of impoverished Appalachians to various other locales.  They merely did it to survive, and it is highly doubtful that many of them rose above the condition of desperate working class once there.

A typical job for a West Virginian immigrant to Ohio, Virginia, or Maryland would be something like garbageman or streetwalker..

[minionofmidas]

Baltimore/DC/Richmond areas seem like the most likely destinations to me.

Correct. That's were all the coal miners in my family went to.

Well yeah, that's how they came to be *your* family.

[they don't love you like i love you]

Actually if rural North Dakota can be used as an analogy, then they most likely moved to metro Charleston, meanwhile people growing up in metro Charleston moved to the areas I mentioned above.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Actually if rural North Dakota can be used as an analogy, then they most likely moved to metro Charleston, meanwhile people growing up in metro Charleston moved to the areas I mentioned above.

Kanawha has lost (and is still losing) population over the past few decades as well (it peaked around 1960... though the westward expansion of Charleston suburbia into Putnam is obviously a factor in that).
Probably an element of that of course (the rural poor moving to small urban centres near where they came from is a pretty common pattern), but it's more a feature of population changes in Kentucky than WV.

[they don't love you like i love you]

Yeah I noticed Charleston was losing population too, that was my first instinct to say where they're going, but the North Dakota pattern makes sense in most places. People from the rural parts move to the cities when the economy can't support them in those areas anymore, and then their kids move to the Twin Cities. The cities of ND are gaining population so it's not perfect, but it's  a pattern that's no doubt happened.

The pattern happens in rural Minnesota too, and in fact is basically what's happened with my parents and me, though a bit more complicated (My parents moved from rural Minnesota to Fargo, which is also common, and then to the Reservation and then Bismarck. If they had just stayed in Fargo and then I moved to the Twin Cities, you'd have a pretty common pattern.) I noticed this was common too in Mankato while I lived there, people moved to Mankato from rural southern Minnesota and Iowa, and then their kids move to the Twin Cities.