Most school children know that the Pilgrims landed at Cape Cod in 1620 and went on to establish Plymouth Colony. Though not the first permanent white settlement in the New World, its impact, based on the experimental ideals of freedom of religion and self-government, has certainly been felt, as has that of its neighbor to the near north, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, established in 1630. During the “Great Migration” between 1630-42, an estimated twenty-thousand of people left England and arrived in these two colonies which eventually merged in 1691, to become the Province of Massachusetts.

Massachusetts was the stepping stone for numerous other colonies that developed along the New England coast and for thousands of immigrants who came in waves across the Atlantic over the last three centuries. Settlements grew first along the shores, then along the river banks, and later were carved out of the forests rich with furs and lumber. These settlements butted up against the cultural differences of the native inhabitants, and contained within themselves festering differences of opinion regarding religious and political views.

Some of those who dissented from their neighbors' views set out to begin their own communities, moving farther and farther west in the colony and sometimes emigrating to other locations, including most of the Eastern seaboard. They often took with them ideas about government and record keeping from their former Massachusetts communities.

Settlement continued steadily based on the peaceful accord between natives, represented particularly by agreement with Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoags, and settlers. All that changed in 1675 when Massasoit's son King Phillip (Metacom) declared open warfare, raiding fifty town in southeastern and central settlements. A year later, the resulting death (including King Phillip's) and destruction in towns ended the warfare, but confidence in settlement was not restored. The Peace of Utrecht in 1713, bringing sweeping changes to the political and economic enterprises in Europe, marking the beginning of Great Britain's colonial and commercial power, stepped up the pace of immigration again.

In the next two decades more and more towns were established as the population grew in all of lower New England. Warfare reared its influence again in a long series of French and Indian wars throughout all the colonies, sending settlers scrambling for safety back from the frontiers to the more securely established towns.

By the time of the American Revolution, nearly everyone still in Massachusetts could trace their ancestry to one of those 20,000 people in the first major immigration. Many of the French Huguenots, Irish, and Ulster-Scots who had also emigrated before the American Revolution, often married into the English families who had arrived earlier. There were also a few Portuguese and some Germans in the early development of the colonies, but it was not until later that these ethnic groups immigrated in large numbers.

Long known for disagreements with the Crown, Massachusetts' ideals and strong voice became a catalyst for the American Revolution. Minutemen and Loyalists, sometimes in the same family, served their respective causes. They were supported on both sides by family memers and former neighbors who had settled in all of the New England colonies. The conclusion of the war found some former New Englanders in the provinces of Canada or the Port of New Orleans for their loyal opposition, and an even larger number of patriots moved to the newly developing frontiers in northern New England and New York. Maine, which remained part of the state of Massachusetts even after the Revolution, became as separate state in 1820.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts was soon in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, which incorporated people with more cultural and linguistic differences. A glimpse of it could be seen as early as the mid-seventeenth century when hundreds of Scottish prisoners—cheap labor for the iron works in Braintree and Lynn—had arrived in Boston's harbor. Although the steady stream of immigrants to Boston's port continued over the next two centuries, the Irish Potato Famine widened that stream considerably in the 1840s and 1850s, providing the Industrial Revolution with a labor force previously unavailable in New England. Many other ethnic groups soon followed.

Massachusetts citizens fought another war of Northern “ideals”, sending its sons, and some daughters, to battlefields in the Civil War. New York eventually outdistanced Massachusetts as an port for immigration, but the industrial development and ethnic diversity of Massachusetts have had a profound impact on the reality of life in New England and left records of a rich history for researchers.