NSBJD – Genealogy information

By: David Gabbitas
Wouldn’t that make family history research so much simpler? Would it be so much fun if it were? Personally, I think not.

The fact is, whilst many of our ancestors were born, raised, married and died in one village, district or county, many of them moved around frequently and often many miles from their birthplaces.

My paternal Grandmother (a Devonian) has a maternal family line that can be traced back to the early 1600’s in Devon but her father was born in Leith, Edinburgh. His family were in Leith at the time of the 1881 census, by the 1891 census the family were in Seacombe, Cheshire and in 1901 the family had settled in Sholing, Hampshire.

My paternal Grandfather, from a long line in Nottinghamshire, had a Yorkshire mother and a 3x great grandmother born in Norfolk.

Generally people moved where the work was (pretty much like we still do today). My gt gt grandfather, a coal miner, worked the mines in Nottinghamshire but in 1881 he was mining in County Durham. Other mining families moved from Yorkshire to Wales or wherever there were mines. Weavers moved from their rural locations, where it had been a cottage industry, to the large towns and cities to newly opened factories.

In 1841, 22% of the workforce were agricultural labourers and 44% were involved in manufacture, so the chances of your ancestors being involved in these two areas would be quite high.

By 1851, for the first time ever for a large nation, there were more of the population living in urban areas than in the countryside.

Whilst our ancestors may have moved into the towns and cities to better provide for their families. Factory work provided a more regular income than the seasonally affected agricultural work, their standard of living did not necessarily rise. With overcrowding, lack of sanitation and a high mortality rate it must have been a hard decision to make.

Many of my own ancestors’ siblings moved to London districts such as Islington, Westminster and Tottenham. What a culture shock this must have been for them. Especially the ones that moved from very rural villages. In 1861 the population of London was 2,803,289 and twenty years later, at the time of the 1881 census, was a staggering 3,815,544. One such distant relative hailed from the village of Woodbury, Devon (population from 1871 census was 1,466) who had moved to London to ply his trade as a boot maker. He later returned to Devon but many did not.

So, yes, it would be easier for us to find our ancestors if they had conveniently stayed put (didn’t they realise 150 years later we would be trying to locate them?). This way we discover what drove them is very similar to what drives us to relocate. We see how industrialisation affected real people with real lives and what impact that had on our lives today.