I am actually part of the Palatine diaspora. An ancestor of mine was born in or near Reichshofen, France, which is about 160 miles east of Paris, in 1726. At the age of 14, he made his way to Rotterdam, probably by sailing down the Rhine, where he boarded a ship for America. Most of the passengers on the ship were fellow Palatines, some, like himself, from Lorraine, and others most likely from Rheinpfalz, to the north.
After arriving in Baltimore, he settled in Frederick, Md., and the family moved steadily westward as the nation grew.
Frederick, MD, was Grand Central Station for Germans during the 18th century. Several of my ancestral German families met up in Frederick -- there is a surviving marriage record for a pair of gggggp's in the Reformed church there -- before moving en masse to North Carolina.