MAPS: Early "MILAM" Births in Great Britain
Until recently this data was on an interactive map hosted by a website which no longer exists. Until I prepare a replacement interactive map using Google Earth, these screen-shots from that website will have to surfice. Unfortunately the year of each birth, the name of the father and the Parish where the birth occured aren't displayed in the images below.
Utilizing English parish records for births and christenings during the 1500s and 1600s as recorded in the International Genealogical Index (IGI), I prepared a map showing the counties and parishes where "MILAM"s and phonetically similar surnames were born. [437] There were 54 recorded births during the 1500s and 253 in the 1600s. As you can see on the map below, the earliest births betweem 1530 and 1575 were mostly in Cumberland county in the Northwest and Norfolk and Suffolk in the East. The earliest recorded birth was an Edmundi Millam (#4) on 21 February 1539 in Cumberland in northwest England.
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If we look at the entire 16th century, most were still living in Cumberland, Norfolk and Suffolk but new MILAMs were found in Berkshire and Sussex in the South of England. The orange pins represent births from 1530 to 1575 and the green pins represent births from 1576 to 1600.
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If we add the 253 MILAM births found in the 17th century with Blue Pins representing 1601 to 1650 and Red Pins representing 1651 to 1700, we can see that births with names phonetically similar to MILAM were found in additional counties such as Angus and Perth in Scotland, Newcastle on the Tyne in Northumberland and in London. However, the overwhelming majority of Milams - two-thirds - continued to be born in the same four counties - Berkshire, Cumberland, Norfolk and Sussex - where they were concentrated a century earlier. Actually the map below only shows 53 of the possible 154 births in the second half of the 17th century since I wanted to emphasize the new counties where Milams lived.
The earliest recorded birth in Scotland was Alisone Millam (#57) on 31 October 1624 in East Lothian County near Edinburgh. But the real growth in Scotland didn't begin until the mid 1660s in Angus and Perth counties.
A possible problem is the lack of recorded "MILAM" births in the southwestern counties of England perhaps due to the destruction of courthouses by fire etc.
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