The first known members of the Land family to emigrated were:

1. Samuel Land, the son of John Land and Mary Dyson, and his wife, Mary Ann Law, (the daughter of William Law and Mary Worth and the sister of Samuel's step mother, Lydia Law Land) and their children immigrated to Philadelphia circa 1871.
2. William, the son of John Land and Mary Dyson, was in "America" between 1871 and 1875 and returned to England.
3. Law Land, his wife, Elizabeth Sykes, and their child, Clarence immigrated to Toronto Canada circa 1882. Law and his family subsequently moved to Detroit Michigan circa 1892, to New Jersey, circa 1895, and finally to Smithtown Long Island in 1900.
4. Law's mother, Lydia Law Land, the widow of John Land, and several of her children immigrated to Philadelphia circa 1882.

The first known members of the Sykes family to emigrated were:

1. Samuel, the son of George Stell Sykes and Sarah Walker, immigrated to Toronto with his family on August 19, 1882.
2. Elizabeth, the daughter of George Stell Sykes and Sarah Walker and the wife of Law Land, immigrated with her husband, Law Land, circa 1882. See Law Land above.
3. Robert, the son of George Stell Sykes and Sarah Walker, immigrated to Toronto circa 1885.

English Immigration

There had been a constant flow of immigrants from England to the United States for a long time.

The heavy emigration from Europe in the hundred years before WW I has been attributed to:

• Population growth due to a decrease in the death rate while the fertility rate remained constant. The end result was that more children lived to adulthood.
• Structural changes in agriculture which allowed the land to be worked by fewer people.
• Urbanization and industrialization. The rate of emigration from England increased as the country became more urban and industrialized.
• Developments in transportation allowed people to move more easily and cheaply.
• Development in communications, such as cheap and plentiful newspapers, allowed shipping companies to reach greater numbers of people with advertisements of fares and destinations.

The peaks for emigration from England before WWI, were in the 1880s and 1890s. Between 1881 and 1890 over 800,000 emigrants (3.1% of England's population) left and did not return to England.The United States and Canada were cheap to reach. Emigration conditions improved when ships went from sail to steam in the 1860s. Cost of passage form Liverpool to New York fell by about 40% between 1860 and the 1890s. A passage to the USA in the 1870s cost a British urban laborer about five or six weeks wages. The 1880s was a period of considerable prosperity in the US and Canada.

Building activity in most of English provincial towns seems to have peaked in 1876 and 1878 and was at a low level through most of the 1880s the time when Law Land (joiner) left England.

Many immigrants came to the United States in an immigration pattern known as chain migration. That is one family member is often followed by other family members. An aspect of chain migration is that the higher the emigration rate the greater the flow of information, money and returning emigrants. Potential emigrants received information about overseas from emigrants who had returned, and from letters from relatives and friends. It is generally believed that at least a quarter of the emigrants before WW I were financed from overseas, frequently by a member of the family sent for that purpose.

Return migration was as high as a quarter or a third of the immigrant population except among the Irish and the Jews. The proportion of immigrants going to urban areas of the US rose as the 19th century progressed . Conversely, immigrants to rural areas fell.

In the 1880s about 15% of the building labor force in New York State were British seasonal workers.

37% of the population of Yorkshire was still living in communities of less than 20,000 people in 1891-1900.

Building activity in most of English provincial towns seems to have peaked in 1876 and 1878 and was at a low level through most of the 1880s.

"The reason why emigration from Lancashire and Yorkshire was relatively low was because people who had been born in those counties seem to have been less prone to consider emigration than natives of London, Staffordshire and South Wales. More instructive, is our observation that emigration from Lancashire and Yorkshire was more concentrated in one decade than emigration from London, South Wales and in some other urban counties. This was in the 1880s when the benefits to be expected from emigration were exceptional."

Dudley Baines in Migration in a mature economy Emigration and internal migration in England and Wales, 1861-1900