Colonel Mark Wilks (1759-1831) was born at Kirk Michael Vicarage, the son of the Reverend James Wilks. He served in the Madras army and was Political Resident at the Court of Mysore before being appointed Governor of St Helena by the East India Company in 1813. He was governor when Napoleon arrived in exile in 1815, and the two men developed a mutual respect. Napoleon later lamented his replacement by the rough and tactless Sir Hudson Lowe. Wilks was also a member of the House of Keys and Speaker, and a distinguished oriental scholar and historian. He came home to the Island and took up its business. He lived at Kirby near Douglas. On 16 October 1817, when the House of Keys inspected its own building and found it not only unfit but imminently unsafe, the members resolved that Mark Wilks and John Christian should form the deputation to wait on the Lieutenant-Governor and impress on him the urgent necessity of soliciting the Secretary of State for an immediate order to rebuild it. He was still in public life in December 1826, when he appears in the list of magistrates for Braddan. He wrote on Manx history too, and the Manx did not thank him for it. He is taken to be the author of the anonymous tract on the characters in Peveril of the Peak, privately printed and very sparingly circulated, and afterwards reprinted in an appendix to the introduction of the last edition of that novel and in Forsyth's Antiquary's Portfolio of 1825, along with the Lament for Illiam Dhone and the Privy Council's order of 5 August 1663. One editor remarks that Sir Walter Scott took all its statements upon trust and entirely mistook some of the principal characters. The Manx Society's editors were sharper: Colonel Wilks, they wrote, was neither a stranger nor unacquainted with the laws and customs of his native country, and so could not have been induced from any motive to pen the erroneous statements the pamphlet contains. The family produced other men of note. His sister Margaret married the Rev. Thomas Cubbon, and their seventh child was Sir Mark Cubbon, born at the vicarage of Maughold on 23 August 1775, who served sixty years in India. Sir Mark Wilks Collet, Governor of the Bank of England, was a Manxman by descent connected with this family and, it was believed, with the Corletts of Loughan-y-yei in Lezayre.

Cottage Grove Lake is a locality in Ohio associated with early Manx settlement in the Western Reserve region. Manx emigrants began arriving in north-east Ohio from the 1820s, establishing farming communities across the area that maintained close ties with the Island and with the larger Manx community in nearby Cleveland.

Edward Callister, known as Edward Callister of Kenaa, was a Manx person identified by their connection to the farm or locality of Kenaa on the Isle of Man. No further sourced biographical detail could be verified for this specific individual; records found for other people named Edward Callister on the Isle of Man (including a member of the Legislative Council who died in 1931, and an Edward Callister associated with the Cleveland Medal in 1922) could not be confirmed as the same person without a documented connection to Kenaa, so are not included here to avoid misattribution.

Elizabeth Christian, recorded in Charles City County, Virginia, in 1662, of the Manx Christian connection in the colony. The family had been there since the middle 1650s. In 1655 two brothers, William and Jonathan Christian of Maughold, went out to Virginia, and a family of Cottiers from Lezayre went with them, the two families intermarrying afterwards. The Christians acquired considerable tracts of land in the colony and their descendants came to be possessed of an ample fortune.

George Borrow, travelling in 1855, met a woman whose son lived in an Ohio village where the Manx language was spoken. The encounter, recorded decades after the first emigration ships sailed, confirmed that the language the emigrants carried across the Atlantic was still alive in the American settlements — at a time when institutional support for Manx on the island itself was continuing to erode.

The routes by which Manx people reached the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are poorly documented. No passenger manifests survive for the period, and the Manx pass system made unofficial departure risky. Several routes were possible. A Manx person could obtain the Governor's licence and take passage from Douglas or Ramsey to Liverpool or Whitehaven, then board an Atlantic vessel. They could cross to Ireland first and embark from Dublin, Belfast, or Londonderry, where the emigrant trade was well established by the eighteenth century. They could join the crew of a trading vessel and leave it in an American port. Or they could enter an indenture with a colonial planter's agent operating in the British Isles, exchanging years of labour for passage and the promise of land at the end of the term. The running trade itself provided another possibility: Manx vessels trading goods between Mann, Ireland, and the continental ports would have offered informal passage to anyone willing to pay or work. After the Revestment of 1765, when the Island's commercial economy collapsed, the emigration intensified and became better documented. The 1827 ships to Ohio were chartered specifically for Manx emigrants, and the press notices of the 1830s and 1840s recorded departures by parish and number. But the earlier, colonial-era movement left few traces beyond the headright patents and land grants in which Manx surnames appear.

For most people in the seventeenth-century British Isles, the Atlantic crossing was beyond their means. The passage from England to Virginia cost between five and six pounds, roughly a year's wages for a labourer. The solution was indentured servitude: a contract in which the emigrant agreed to work for a specified term, usually four to seven years, in exchange for the cost of passage, food, shelter, and clothing during the term. At the end of the indenture the servant received 'freedom dues,' which could include land, tools, clothing, or a sum of money. The system was not slavery, but it was not free labour either. Servants could be bought and sold during their term, could not marry without permission, and were subject to physical punishment. Runaways were hunted and had their terms extended. For people from small island communities like Mann, where the pass system restricted movement and economic opportunities were limited, indentured servitude offered a route to the colonies that required no capital. A person appearing as a 'headright' in a Virginia land patent may have been an indentured servant whose passage was paid by the patentee, a family member transported at a relative's expense, or a free person whose passage was sponsored by an investor. The record does not usually distinguish between them.

James Christian, one of the five founders of the Manx Society at Cleveland. The society was formed in 1851 by five men with characteristically Manx names, Christian among them with John Corlett, William K. Corlett, William Cubbon and William Brew. Its purpose was to assist and take care of the poor immigrant from the Isle of Man who arrived with an empty pocket or in feeble health, and it holds an honoured place among the pioneer bodies of its kind in America. The settlement it served was a generation old by then. The first Manx families reached the Cleveland district in 1826, and about seventy families, some two hundred people, followed into Ohio in 1827. Christian was not among the most characteristic of the Ohio Manx surnames, which ran to Crellin, Shimmin, Kaighin, Cowley, Collister, Gelling, Kermeen, Monier, Mylchreest, Carran, Kewley, Lewin, Bridson, Crow, Killip, Cain, Corkill, Looney, Clucas and Kneen.

Joe Kelly was a Manx emigrant who settled in the Cleveland, Ohio area during the nineteenth century, forming part of the significant Manx community in the American Midwest.

One of the Manx Quakers banished from the Island under the restored Stanley lordship. The persecution began under the Commonwealth and went on after it. In 1656 William Callow and Evan Christian suffered severe imprisonment in Peel Castle, the one for refusing to pay sixteen pence and the other twopence demanded by a priest for the bread and wine of the sacrament, and similar cases are recorded through to 1659. James Chaloner, then Governor, was heard to say that he would quickly rid the Island of Quakers. The end of it was transportation. The prisoners were told that as persons cast out of the Church by excommunication they were delivered over from the power of the Bishop and his law, to be and continue the Earl of Derby's prisoners. On 15 April 1665 Governor Henry Nowell came to the Castle and read them an order from the Earl of Derby that they must forthwith be transported into some other land, and on the 29th two men came by the Deputy-Governor's order to carry it out. Banished Manx Quakers were among the earliest Manx settlers in the American colonies.

John Corlett, one of the five founders of the Manx Society at Cleveland. He was one of the five men, all bearing Manx names, who set the society up in 1851: James Christian, John Corlett, William K. Corlett, William Cubbon and William Brew. It existed to help the immigrant from the Isle of Man who reached Cleveland with an empty pocket or in poor health, and it is counted among the earliest bodies of its kind in America. Corlett was one of the Manx names that took firmest root in northern Ohio, and the family produced both the fullest surviving set of emigrant letters and, two generations on, a physician of international standing.

John E. Christian was a member of the Christian family of Manx origin who settled in America. He forms part of the wider pattern of Manx emigration to the United States.

The Manx Choral Society in Cleveland, Ohio, was a musical organisation serving the Manx diaspora community in the city. Cleveland's estimated 25,000 to 30,000 people of Manx origin sustained a vibrant cultural life, with the Choral Society reflecting the strong traditions of communal music-making brought from the Island.

The language lived longer in Ohio than it would live on Mann. In the 1830s and 1840s, Manx was still a living tongue in Ohio — spoken in homes, in chapel, in the fields where they cleared the American forest. Pastor Cannell, the seventy-two-year-old Wesleyan who had crossed on the Ocean, held services in Manx in his own log house. No Governor could withdraw it. No bishop could declare it unnecessary. No school board could replace it with English, because there were no schools in the Ohio settlements that the Manx had not built themselves. The language died in Ohio too, eventually. Margaret Murray remembered the same pattern as on the island: the old folks would talk Manx when they did not want the children to understand. But for a time, the institutional supports that had sustained Manx on the island and been removed by the Revestment were unnecessary in Ohio — the Manx people had each other.

Copper-mining district in the northern Rocky Mountains which drew Manx miners from the late nineteenth century. Montana has produced copper for something over eighty years, principally around Butte, a site which has been called the richest hill on earth. Silver, gold, lead and zinc were worked there as well. The district's Manx element was strong enough to support a branch of the North American Manx Association, and the men who went out included Wilson Jenkinson, a Foxdale miner whose great-grandfather had come from the English Lake District. The connection is one of skill rather than of chance. Foxdale was the Island's own lead and zinc field, and the mining districts of Montana recruited the kind of men it trained. Nothing further about the settlement survives in the corpus consulted. Of the sixteen passages returned for this item, fifteen are false positives on the word Butte, mostly Butteland in Northumberland, the Earl of Bute and the Butte de Tumiac in Brittany.

Chicago attracted Manx settlers particularly after the great fire of 1871, when reconstruction work brought over many Manx builders and carpenters. By the mid-twentieth century, the city contained a substantial population of Manx descent, with about half of the North American Manx Association's Illinois membership residing in and around Chicago. The Manx had reached Illinois well before the city drew them. Although the state entered the Union in 1818 its settlement was not rapid, because access from the east was awkward until the railway got through to Chicago from Detroit in 1852. The easier way in was from the south, by New Orleans and the Mississippi, and that was the route the first recorded Manx settlers took: the Kelly family from Onchan. Small groups of farmers from the Island arrived at Brimfield in 1848 and 1849 and spread from there into the adjoining counties, so the Galva and Peoria districts can claim to be the oldest Manx settlements in the state. Most of the association's Illinois members outside Chicago still lived in those districts in the 1950s. Chicago itself drew Manx people from other parts of North America as well as directly from the Island. One of them turned the city's growth to account: in 1884 John J. Keig from Ballaugh was opening trading posts and carting produce to and from Chicago along the old plank roads. No estimate has ever been made of how many people of some Manx descent the city holds, and they are found in a wide variety of occupations.

Galva, in the north-central section of Illinois, was settled by Manx farming families from 1848 and 1849 onwards, with emigrants coming particularly from Onchan, Crosby, Peel, and northern parishes such as Bride and Andreas. The Galva Manx Society held meetings attended by several hundred persons, and the settlement formed part of a broader Manx presence across the Illinois prairie farmlands.

Minnesota was among the American states where Manx emigrants settled during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The state's membership in the North American Manx Association reflects the broader pattern of Manx settlement across the upper Midwest. It came well down the order. The standard survey of Manx settlement in the United States puts Ohio first and Illinois next, with Wisconsin some distance behind, then the mining areas of Montana, Wyoming and Arizona. Minnesota is named among the other states of any significance in the Middle West, with Iowa and Nebraska, alongside a few in the north-east, namely Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut, and Utah, Colorado and the District of Columbia.

Manx miners settled in Iowa County, Wisconsin, near Dodgeville and Mineral Point, during the lead mining boom of the mid-nineteenth century. By 1855 the community was large enough to build its own church, known as the Laxey Church, but the settlement dispersed as the shallow lead deposits were exhausted in the second half of the century.

The Mona's Mutual Benefit Society was a fraternal organisation established by the Manx diaspora community in Cleveland, Ohio. It provided mutual aid and social support to Manx emigrants and their descendants in the city's substantial Manx-American population.

The Mona's Relief Society was founded in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1851 by five Manx emigrants - James Christian, John Corlett, William K. Corlett, William Cubbon, and William Brew - to assist and care for poor immigrants from the Isle of Man arriving with empty pockets or in poor health. It is honoured as a pioneer among the many benevolent societies that later came into being to support various immigrant communities in America.

The Mona's Relief Society Ladies' Auxiliary was the women's branch of the Mona's Relief Society in Cleveland, Ohio. It supported the parent organisation's charitable work on behalf of Manx emigrants and their families in the Cleveland area.

The historian A.W. Moore fixed 1824 as the date at which the Manx labourer reached his lowest depth of misery. The 1827 emigration ships sailed three years later. The timing was not coincidental. The people who packed their chests and walked behind the carts laden with luggage from the north of the island to the harbour at Douglas were leaving at the worst possible moment — which was also the only moment when leaving became easier to face than staying.

Organisation formed in the United States to connect people of Manx descent across North America. R. H. Kinvig’s 1955 study of Manx settlement in the United States states that the Association was founded in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1928. It celebrated its silver jubilee at a Cleveland convention in 1953. Membership reached about one thousand in 1950. Kinvig used the Association’s membership records to map the distribution of people of Manx origin across the United States. Ohio had more than 300 members, with Cleveland as the principal centre. Illinois had more than 100, followed by California, New York, Michigan and Washington, with smaller concentrations in mining and industrial districts across the country. The Association held annual conventions apart from the interruption of the Second World War and issued a quarterly bulletin. By the early 1950s branches existed in several regions, including north-east Ohio, Los Angeles, San Francisco and the mining district around Bisbee in Arizona. Its meetings retained visible connections with the Island. Kinvig recorded the Manx flag being displayed alongside the flags of the United States and Canada, and “Ellan Vannin” and “O Land of our Birth” being sung with the American and Canadian national anthems. The wider North American Manx community also maintained cultural links through organised homecomings and the Cleveland Medal, established from a fund raised in 1923 and awarded at the Manx Musical Festival.

Richard Christian, whose passage to Virginia was claimed as a headright. The Virginia land patents were granted in return for transporting settlers, fifty acres for each person brought in, and the patents list the people by name. Richard Christian's name stands in one such list, among some scores of others carried on the same account, so that his arrival in the colony is recorded not for his own sake but as part of another man's title to land. The Manx Christians who went to Virginia are documented from a little later. In 1655 two brothers, William and Jonathan Christian of Maughold, went out, and a family of Cottiers from Lezayre went at the same time, the two families afterwards intermarrying. The Christians acquired considerable tracts of land in Virginia and their descendants came to be possessed of an ample fortune.