Think of your family origins. Were they German, English, Scottish. Were they Protestant, Catholic, Jewish? Were they Black, were they White? All of these characteristics had great influence on how and where your families lived.

All of us have heard about the great immigrations; the Irish because of their Potato Famine, the English because of their colonization, the Jews and others because of Religious Persecutions throughout the Centuries.

All of these groups can be considered pods.

The small exception to these pods are those people who lived where they did because of their occupation choice. People like railroaders, farmers, and miners often podded for economic reasons and not because of race, religion, or ethnicity.

In my family, on my mother’s side, her ancestors came from the Rhine Valley of Germany. They were inspired and recruited by William Penn and his agents to travel to America and form what became Germantown, Pennsylvania.

Germantown eventually grew and became Philadelphia.In this growth there were several waves of people that settled the region. As each new group arrived they expanded the base town of Philadelphia and also began to split off and form smaller sub groups surrounding the core towns. With these splits were created sub pods of the same people, beliefs and characteristics.

Following this pattern of podding across the state you can see where and how each of these groups expanded and the distinct patterns to this expansion. There were three specific waves out of Philadelphia, one to the North and Northwest which created the towns of Allentown and Harrisburg, one straight across the southern counties of the state and one South and Southwest that helped populate parts of Delaware and Maryland.

So, when you are tracing your family no matter where you start, if you look for pod patterns like this it will usually make your research much easier. Family groups often traveled together so if you see specific names at your starting point you can often look for those same family groups in earlier generations. Assuming there were no major catastrophic events these patterns should hold true. Even if there were major events the patterns may hold also pending on how people dispersed because of the events.

You may ask what I mean by these events. A prime example would be if an area flooded most of the people in that area would move as a group to the new area. Now , lets consider a variation on this theory. When the Federal Government created the Tennessee Valley Authority they displaced thousands of families in several states. Some of those families relocated near the edge of the flooded land while others moved completely away from the area. Thus, their pod patterns would have been disrupted and not followed their normal course.

The same thing happened with the Great Depression, except that a new greater pod pattern was created when thousands of families moved to California, no matter what their race, religion, ethnicity thereby destroying the base attributes of their originating pods.

Interesting isn't it? If you can get the hang of how and why your ancestors podded you will gain a much clearer perspective on how and why they lived where they did, and created the lives they did.