Over the years, even as new families continued to arrive and settle in Harlan, other families pulled up stakes and moved elsewhere. Barney Banks wrote recently asking, "Why did they leave?"

Some of this movement was simply a natural spreading of the population into adjacent areas, mostly northwards into Clay, present day Leslie, Owsley and other mountain counties. Mostly they left for the same reasons their fathers and grandfathers had come, a fresh start and hopes for a better future. The Kentucky mountains were never as easy place to live. In the early years, there was plenty of game to put meat on the table and, for most of the 19th century, there was land to be had for little or nothing.

But, life was harsh. Early in the 1800's there were still many problems with Indian raids. By mid-century, game was getting scarcer and with few exceptions, farming was difficult in our mountainous terrain. For most of the century there were few of the benefits of the civilized life available in more populous areas such as doctors, teachers and employment to put cash in one's pockets.

In the early years, the frontier that attracted them was north-westwards into Ohio, Illinois and Indiana. As always, some families moved to these frontiers only to return to the mountains within a few years. Fielding Green and his wife Esther were one of these couples. They moved to Bartolomew County, Ind., about 1833. Their three children, Sarah, Vienna and Hiram were all born there. Some time in the 1840's, they returned to Harlan County.

Mountainous areas seem to have retained their attraction for Harlan Countians looking for a future and the Ozark Mountain of Arkansas and Missouri was the destination for many throughout the years. The Fee, Noe and Helton families were among those who settled in that area. Sometimes historical events and economic conditions had an effect on the where and why of migration. In 1839, there was a financial panic and two families prominent in local financial affairs both sold out and left.

Thomas Sewall and Balis Shumate had both been active in the 1830's in Harlan in various real estate and bonding transactions and Sewall, in particular, had held a number of mortgages. Sewall moved his wife, Joanna Turner, and children to Breathitt County. Balis Shumate's first wife was Joanna Turner Sewall's sister, Mary, who drowned in 1828. Balis and Mary's grown children had moved west to Arkansas and Missouri a few years earlier and Balis took his second wife, Mary, the widow of Thomas Hendrickson and joined them.

In the late 1840's, Texas attracted a lot of Kentucky families, among them several of the Ball families from Harlan, joined by several more after 1850. The California gold strike made "49'ers" out of a lot of hopeful young Kentuckians and movement to the west reached into Oregon.

About 1860, with the Civil War on the horizon, a lot of families chose not to take sides in the coming conflict but instead to move west, again to Arkansas and Missouri but also to Kansas, where many settled in Wilson County.

The mountains of eastern Kentucky were devastated by the war itself and afterwards many more families sought a better future westwards in Kansas, Oregon and elsewhere. In the 1880's, homestead possibilities where acres of land could be had from the government drew more families to Kansas and to Oklahoma.

In the decades at the turn of the century, first timber then coal interests moved in, buying up the land. Through this time period, a large number of families moved over into Lee County, Va., and into Powell, Meniffe and Rockcastle counties.