Society Saturday - Green Fingers at the Marske Show

My great-aunt Lillian Barton, loved to garden and was an active member of her local gardening society right into her 70s.  Lillian may not have known it, but gardening was a long standing interest in the family of her paternal grandmother Eliza Ditchburn (1856-1930).

Eliza Ditchburn's family came from the village of Marske-by-the-Sea which is just south of Middlesbrough.  Her family, through her Bryden, Hartforth and Potts ancestors, can be traced back in the village right back into the 16th Century.

The Ditchburn family's gardening interests were shared by large numbers of Marske residents and from August 1875, the annual Marske Horticultural, Industrial and Live Stock Society show was a highlight of village life bringing together people from right across the class divide.

Mystery Monday - Thompsons Thompsons Everywhere!

There really are Thompsons everywhere, which does make reliably tracking them down hard work.  And if they're called John Thompson like my great-grandfather and his father it becomes even easier to make mistakes.

I spent several years following a completely erroneous branch of the Thompson family after confusing two John Thompsons born in the same month, in the same parish.  It was very interesting researching Norfolk local history - it's just that no one in our family has ever lived there!

And now I am following the right branch - I hope! - my great-grandfather has got me stumped again.  His 1907 marriage certificate shows that John was already, at just 27, a widow.

But I have not been able to find a record for this other marriage or indeed any census record for John in 1901 which might give a clue as to where he was.

Thrifty Thursday - Post Office Savings

I remember Post Office savings books from my childhood in the 1970s.  They were still a big part of everyday life then, providing an easily accessible and "safe" way to save money.

And right from it's creation in 1861, "safety" was the watch word of the The Post Office's Savings Bank (POSB).  Understandably so as the previous decades had seen a number of high profile bank failures in Britain, in which people had lost their savings.

The PSOB allowed even those without sufficient money to open a standard bank account to save and to have their savings guaranteed by the government.

These savings books belonging to my great aunt - Lillian Barton (nee Thompson) -  show how actively the savings accounts were used.

The account was originally opened in Richmond, Yorkshire in 1935 after Lillian's marriage and show deposits between 3 and 6 deposits a year of never more than £7 (£200 today) at a time and sometimes less than £1 (£18).  There were withdrawals, but through small savings she had by the beginning of 1951 saved £173, the equivalent of £4,670 in today's money.

In 1951 this pattern of use completely changed and the equivalent of almost £4,000 was withdrawn from the account at branches near to the house of Lillian's sister Nancy in Upminster, Essex.  I am merely guessing here - but it appears that Lillian may have used the nest egg provided by her earlier thrift to walk away from an unhappy marriage.

If you're interested in finding out more about British postal history check out the British Postal Museum and Archive and if you enjoyed this post do come and talk history and genealogy on Twitter.

Mystery Monday - There but not there!

Lillian Newnham, the daughter of William Essex Newnham and Margaret Gill, was born in Guisborough, Yorkshire in 1879.  Her parents had only moved to Yorkshire from Woolwich, London a few years before her birth and  the rest of the Newnham and Gill families - apart from her mother's brother Edward who came north with them - remained in London.

Census records show Lillian living in the Guisborough area with her family in 1881 and 1891 but after that no trace can be found of her in census, marriage or death records and she effectively disappears.

Except she doesn't.  For in the belongings inherited from her nieces - my great aunts - she is ever present.

There are photos of a slightly austere but stylish woman in the 1920s, gorgeous Raphael Tuck Oilette post cards sent to her nieces in  the 1930s and beautifully inscribed books given to her nieces and nephews as birthday and Christmas presents.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner that I love Middlesbrough!

Woolwich Arsenal © 2009 Loz Flowers Creative Commons Licence

My grandfather was born and raised in the north of England in the 1920s but he was a lifelong "Gooner".  That is - for those of you not fans of English football - he supported Arsenal, a football club founded in south London in 1886.  It wasn't that he was disloyal but that his mother's family had moved north from London where they had all worked at the great Woolwich Arsenal ordnance works, the birth place of Arsenal football club.

I was incredibly surprised on first discovering that my "northern" grandfather was - at least half - a Londoner.  The story didn't seem to fit with the picture I had of migration to the great industrial cities of northern England that grew like wildfire in the 19th Century.  I thought these cities had been built on local rural workers and migrants from those areas of the UK that suffered the worst agriculturally - Ireland, Scotland, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cornwall and the like.  Not Londoners!

I couldn't understand why my grandfather's family would have moved from south London where they were settled and had employment to the area around Middlesbrough in north Yorkshire to which they had no ties.  The work at the Arsenal was certainly hard - my grandfather's grandmother filled ammunition caps there when she was just a child - but it was still employment and the ironstone mines of Middlesbrough were hardly offering anything easier!

So I started to research whether this was a personal journey or one that other families had made at a similar time.  What I uncovered completely changed my understanding of 19th Century migration within the United Kingdom.  From a quick analysis of the census I discovered over 50 families made the journey from Woolwich to Middlesbrough and the surrounding villages of the "rusty gold" ironstone  mines as Middlesbrough grew at a phenomenal speed from a village of just 154 people in 1831 to "Ironopolis" or as Gladstone described it an "infant Hercules" and a population of over 90,000 by 1901.

Families in Middlesbrough, Guisbrough, Marske, Skelton, Wilton & Redcar connected to Woolwich
1861 Hormer, Keay, Bruntfield
1871 Patterson, White, Grundy, Everson, Edwards, Shaw, Taylor, Waterman, Gatehouse
1881 Armstrong, Hodder, Newton, Newnham, Gill, Wiltshire, Bingham, Buss, Cook, Copus, Denney, Higgins, Jessop, King, Oldham, Tindale, Walker, Ward, Watts, Wray, Wright
1891 Drew, Oheara, Holmes, Sadler, Smith
1901 Havord, Jones, Lawrence, Moulton, Naylor, Walker, White
1911 Tucker, Cafferey, Denney, Dormelly, Easton, Gibbins, Haggerty, Lawrence, McLoughlin, MacNeil, Mitchell, Pearson, Rice, Stevens, Wagg, Walker, Waylor, White, Young

Middlesbrough from Guisborough © 2007 T Brelstaff Creative Commons Licence

What these records seem to show is that the new cities of the north needed not just raw unskilled agricultural labour but also skilled or at least semi-skilled workers that they had to recruit from previously industrialised areas.  And that there was an ongoing need to recruit workers not just as the cities grow but as their core industries changed and developed, with the majority of the Woolwich families moving to Middlesbrough in the 1870s and later when Middlesbrough was being forced through global competition to innovate radically to hold onto its position as the world's largest steel producer.

Further research into these families also challenged my preconception that migration to the new cities of the north was a one off.  I thought that families "upped sticks", moved and then stayed put in their new home.  But the migration patterns of the Woolwich families are much more complicated.  Some of them seem to have been long time south London and Kent families, but others such as the Gills who originated from Worcestershire & Herefordshire had only been in Woolwich for one generation before moving north and other such as the Gatehouses, Ohearas and Newtons were actually local Yorkshire families who had moved to Woolwich and then back up to Middlsbrough.

What emerges is a pattern of families moving backwards and forwards taking skills with them and returning with new skills.  And it was a pattern that my grandfather continued.  In the 1930s, still in his teens he got on a train by himself and made the journey back south to London to start as an apprentice at - of course - the Royal Ordnance Works in Woolwich.

Please do add your posts on migration within or to the United Kingdom to the linky below:

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Researching patterns of migration from and to places that your family lived is pretty straightforward but requires a little patience.  If you have some migration clues from your own family history, it's simply a question of searching for census records containing both places names or if specific villages aren't producing results with county names.  If you don't have any clues to start from it's a matter of wading through census searches for your target place to see if records come up with births or deaths outside the county and then using these for more specific searches to see if they are individual movements or part of something wider.