"Many of the early settlers of Barbados eventually moved to the mainland of North America and settled in Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas, and other colonies. A son of John Winthrop, for example, was one of the original settlers of Barbados, and two of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Lewis Morris and Arthur Middleton, were descended from men who left Barbados a century earlier. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, in fact, there was a continuous flow of settlers from Barbados to virtually every point on the Atlantic seaboard, with the result that many families in America today trace their origins in the New World first to Barbados." -- publisher website (December 2008).