We are all migrants. And it is astonishing how mobile our ancestors were. For example, at the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago the British Isles were more or less unpopulated. Since then wave after wave of immigrants have colonised these islands. These include the hunter-gatherers from continental Europe shortly after the ice melted and the ground thawed, followed by Neolithic farmers, mercenary soldiers with the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Huguenots, Polish and Russian Jews escaping the pogroms of the Russian empire, refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, Commonwealth immigrants and most recently EU immigrants.

And the movement has not all been one way. Emigrants have included the Puritans to the North American colonies, those transported to Australia, economic migrants seeking a better life in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and the hundreds of thousands of retired people who now live in France, Spain and Portugal.

And then there is the enormous amount of in-migration and out-migration (migration within national borders) that has been going on from earliest times. Consider, for example, surnames indicating a place of origin (called locative surnames) such as Kendal in Cumbria, Hoyland in Yorkshire and Ramsbottom in Lancashire. Studies using sources such as the Hearth Tax returns of the 1670s, which are available for most parts of England and Wales, show how families carrying a locative surname have moved since the Middle Ages. If the distribution of the names is plotted they show much local migration and longer-distance migration, mostly towards London.

Using the census enumerators’ returns between 1841 and 1911, the impact of the Industrial Revolution on regional migration can also be clearly shown. Take the example of the small, purpose-built, mining settlement called Concrete Cottages in the Dearne valley near Wombwell in South Yorkshire in 1901. The settlement dates from 1876 when the neighbouring Cortonwood Colliery was sunk. In 1901 Concrete (as it was simply called in the census) had a population of 580 and many of its inhabitants were migrants. There were migrants from the neighbouring counties of Cheshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire, from Lancashire, Durham and Staffordshire, and further away from London and Kent. There were also people born in Flintshire and Anglesey in North Wales and from Ireland and from the most rural parts of England – Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. And most surprisingly of all there was one person who had been born in the United States.

The push-pull concept
One way of making sense of all this movement is to use the push-pull concept. This simply states that for any individual the decision to migrate results from the interplay of two forces: pressures at the permanent place of residence (pushes) and inducements from a number of potential destinations (pulls). Examples of push factors are low wages, unemployment, political, social and religious oppression and natural disasters such as drought, famine and flood. Pull factors include employment offers and opportunities, better medical and social provision, and political and religious tolerance.

It is clear that in some cases the pushes will be of major significance, for example when unforeseen disasters occur. Two very different migrations illustrate this point. In the 1840s the potato blight brought famine to rural Ireland. In 1841 the population of Ireland was 8.2 million. By 1851 the population was 6.5 million. The commissioners of the census remarked that at the normal rate of increase, the population should have been over nine million, so the real loss was about 2½ million people in ten years. People simply fled (or died).

On a much smaller scale was the migration of Welsh coal miners and their families from Mostyn in the parish of Whitford on the Dee estuary, in what was then Flintshire, when the Mostyn Quay Colliery was flooded in 1884. When it became clear that the colliery would never re-open, the impact on the community was devastating. Around 200 men and boys who had worked at the colliery became unemployed and shopkeepers and other tradespeople felt the effect of the disaster. A detailed investigation of the subsequent out-migration was undertaken in 1889 by the winning entrant in the annual Mostyn essay competition, the theme of which was ‘The flooding of Mostyn Colliery and the scattering of the people’. Between 1884 and 1889 it was reckoned that 341 people had migrated from Mostyn: 147 had gone to other parts of North Wales, 170 were living in England, three had migrated to Alabama in the USA and eight had settled in Argentina. Most families by 1889 had migrated to the nearby Lancashire coalfield in and around the town of Prescot. It is said that some of these migrants took their pit ponies with them but that they would only respond to commands in Welsh! I shall return to this Welsh diaspora below.

Many migrations take place in a series of relatively short movements, often in the past from hamlet to village, to small town and finally to a large regional centre. In the 19th century sometimes short moves resulted from decline of domestic industry in the countryside and the concentration of employment in factories in towns. Take, for example, the case of the Dryden family who were handloom linen weavers in Brompton near Northallerton in the then North Riding of Yorkshire in the 1830s. But domestic linen manufacturing was in rapid decline and it was reported that linen weavers there were in great distress because of low wages and scarcity of employment. So the Dryden family moved 20 miles further south to Knaresbrough in 1837 but found the same situation there. So they moved another 15 miles to Leeds in 1840 and by 1851 they were living in Barnsley another 20 miles further to the south. At that date the head of the family and two of his sons were handloom weavers, who worked in their cellar loomshops, and one daughter was a linen winder. But they were overtaken by events. The linen weaving industry was becoming a factory industry. By 1871 one son was a linen factory hand, three other sons were coal miners and a grand-daughter was a linen factory worker.

Intervening obstacles and sponsored migration
There is another component to the push-pull concept. The potential migrant is confronted by one or a number of real or perceived obstacles that must be overcome before migration can take place. These may be, for example, physical (the Atlantic Ocean, the Rockies), financial, academic or legal (work permit regulations, immigration quotas). What also needs to be remembered is that satisfaction with the place in which a person lives is based on first-hand experience; for other places it may be based entirely on second-hand information. If we return to the millions of people displaced by the Irish potato famine, the dilemma facing those starving, extremely poor potential migrants is very clear: where could they go and how could they finance their journey?

Many made the very short journey to England but large numbers went to North America. In some cases their migration was sponsored. For example, Earl Fitzwilliam who owned 90,000 acres in Ireland, mostly in County Wicklow, organised a scheme for assisting poor and penniless small estate tenants. Between 1847 and 1856 he provided sea chests for family belongings, and arranged for transport to the port of New Ross where hired ships were waiting to take impoverished tenants and their families to Canada. There was no force involved; all the adults volunteered to take part in the migration, which, it must be admitted, was not without self-interest on the part of the earl: he was able to re-assign their tenanted plots to new tenants. Altogether he sponsored the migration of 850 families, amounting to 6,000 men, women and children.

Another migration, this time of one extended family, illustrates intervening obstacles and sponsorship. George Wadsworth was born in Pilley in South Yorkshire in 1827. He was a coal and ironstone miner. His uncle James Wadsworth had been converted to the Mormon church in 1841, three years after the first Mormon missionaries had arrived in England. In 1852 he baptised George into the Mormon church. During 1855 the Mormons decided to increase the number of European converts migrating to the United States by sponsoring poorer members who could not afford oxen and wagons for their journey across the Great Plains and Rockies to Utah. On 25 May 1856 James and George Wadsworth and their families sailed from Liverpool in the three-masted Horizon. After a journey of 36 days they arrived in Boston on 29 June. They then went by rail from Boston to Iowa City. James Wadsworth set off on foot on 1 August in a ‘handcart train’, on a journey that lasted four months. On the last part of the journey they were assisted by a rescue party from Salt Lake City, but not before James Wadsworth’s mother had died in the mountains. George Wadsworth made the same journey the following year, this time in a wagon pulled by two oxen.

Chain migration
A distinction is sometimes made between what are termed active and passive migrants. Active migrants are the pioneers, the trail-blazers, who take the physical, financial and psychological risks, get jobs and become established at a new location. They send messages back to the former home area and they are then followed by other migrants who feel they are taking much less of a risk. These are the passive migrants. It is often relatives, friends and neighbours who make up the flow of passive migrants and a chain of migration is established.

This can be illustrated by the migration of the Welsh miners from Mostyn in North Wales after the local colliery was flooded in 1884. The disaster coincided with the appointment of a native of Mostyn, Evan Parry, as manager of Wharncliffe Woodmoor (Old Carlton) Colliery in the village of Carlton, a few miles north of Barnsley in South Yorkshire. Besides his wife and young family, Parry was soon joined by his two younger married sisters and his two younger brothers. By 1891 there were seven other pioneering families and thirteen single men from North Wales living either in Carlton or the neighbouring village of Smithies.

News of this growing Welsh community in South Yorkshire continued to trickle back to the home area and to migrants who had gone initially to other parts of the country. By 1891 there were 94 people of Welsh origin living in Carlton and Smithies and by 1901 there were 38 families containing nearly 200 people headed by a Welsh-born man employed in coal mining. And Carlton became known locally as ‘Little Wales’. A Welsh chapel was built in 1902 and it remained open until December 1983. Until the very end the sign announcing its name and times of services was in Welsh! As might be expected from my name I am descended from Welsh migrants myself: my grandparents came to live in Smithies in 1903 via Parr in Lancashire.

In the print edition
Read Melvyn’s article about child labour in the mining industry in Issue 4 of Discover Your Ancestors, available to buy at discoveryourancestors.co.uk .