The People Who Left

The history of our family has been a major work for over twenty years now. The patterns of people and places, over several generations moving in the UK and overseas have completely changed the way I look at each branch of the family.

I’m 98 percent British and Celtic, the rest Iberian. I imagine that’s standard for someone half English and half Welsh, living in the UK. Within the British Isles, it is fairly straightforward, through the census, to trace the movements of ancestors within the last 200 years, at least. If anyone is new to Family History, anything your parents and grandparents can tell you about where they came from is a good place to begin.

Family history gives us the opportunity to look at the lives of generations of our ancestors with hindsight, in order to understand the people who made us. But these people are also shaped by the places where they settled.

Some branches of our family reached America, Canada, and Australia. The DNA tests were very helpful in finding family overseas. There aren’t many unusual names in our tree but a simple change of spelling can be a huge obstacle in tracing people in other countries. Many of the family were illiterate, so such misspellings happened often. It’s too easy to take a romantic view of emigration. Perhaps these were exciting opportunities to some, but the families that I have been able to research had very little stability or choice in their lives before they made these journeys. What surprises me is that the brothers of coal miners in the South Wales Valleys went to Pennsylvania to become coal miners. Families who worked in textiles in Leicester emigrated to Australia to work in textiles. So it seems, whatever the hype about a fresh start in a new country, the limitations of social mobility in Britain carried over to their new lives.

How did these people feel as they settled into their new lives so far from home? Many in the first generation of migrants seem to begin their new lives by giving their children more aspirational names. So perhaps they were looking forward and full of hope. My Welsh families, in Pennsylvania, continued to speak Welsh into the second and third generation following their arrival in the United States. I wonder if they had plans to come back to Wales. I have also found two great-great uncles who moved to the southern US, and their descendants spoke no English at all, only Spanish. The branch of their family that remained in the east of England were agricultural labourers who traveled seasonally through three different Counties to make their living. Further back in time they are recorded as Huxters in the few Census records that they are shown in. Their lives are sparsely documented, and it makes sense that they quickly adapted to life across the border regions of the southern US and Mexico. These people fascinate me, because they have a distinctly different way of life without any need to belong in any particular place.

Looking at the Huxters in England, they seemed to live their lives across three different Counties traveling with the seasons between the homes of their more settled relatives. In the family tree, as a whole, to make a home in the next County or further afield would effectively mean that the people who left might never see their families again. A hundred years ago, when people moved to a new town, they usually had a connection in that town. Quite often you find Aunts, Uncles or cousins close by. They work in the same industries and often live in the same street. It’s easy to imagine that when there’s work available, families write home to their wider families and help them make the move. Physical distance was a huge obstacle between people. I find this pattern a lot with my Welsh ancestors. People who lived as little as 10 miles apart would have very few opportunities to meet outside Church meetings or agricultural markets. If they married and moved away, even a distance of 30 miles, it might be many years before they saw their families again.

Family History is a satisfying jigsaw puzzle; matching the partners and rounding up all the children. It’s a good feeling to complete another branch of the tree, but sometimes when you look at the next generations, you realize how far circumstance and history can push people apart. I often wonder if some of the relatives that I am able to fit into the tree now, may have been completely lost to their families within their own lifetime. Before the Industrial Revolution there are reassuring patterns in more sustainable lives that kept families together. There is continuity of trades and family names that reinforce a sense of belonging and tenure that these people felt for the places that they inhabited in a world where nothing seemed to change.