* historical travel and transportation research

[jmurphy]

Back in January, on her blog No Story Too Small, American blogger Amy Johnson Crow posted a New Year's challenge to other bloggers to write about one ancestor each week. Her challenge is in her post Challenge: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks.

Combined with some recent promotions for Find My Past and the British Newspaper Archive, this has inspired me to look over some of my key people one by one and to look for historical records I might be missing. When your focus family stays in the same place for generations, this is easy. When you can't find them, it helps to branch out -- but how far is too far?

In my research on the US side, I've discovered historical guide books, some aimed specifically at immigrants to the US. Some have recommendations for travel routes, so if you know what port they arrived at and what town their destination was, you can see what the guidebooks of the day advised them to do for travel from one place to another.

In another lucky dip, I found a blogger whose family was in the same area as my father's family. She posted a train schedule that listed all the stops on the train, so now I know, if someone wanted to travel from my father's hometown to one of the other stops on the line, I can see how long it would have taken them to go from one town to another.

So what I'm looking for now are equivalent materials for England.

One favorite resource is the collection Historical Directories of England & Wales at the University of Leicester library.

I also make use of the historical maps available at A Vision of Britain Through Time, www.old-maps.co.uk , and The Ordnance Survey Maps at The National Library of Scotland.

I'm also looking for websites that would talk about travel inside England, along the same lines as The Gjenvick-Gjønvik Archives, a big site about steamship travel.

The goal is to fill in the gaps between the census records, and to provide clues going forward from 1911 (the last available census). My arbitrary starting point is the start of civil registration. I'm particularly interested in the South Hams, but if you have a favorite reference, I'd love to hear about it. Thanks!

[tatewise]

Firstly, FYI South Hams is an area between the River Dart and Plymouth in south Devon, England.

I suspect you have already looked, but there may be some resources in the KB that might help:
research:useful_research_web_sites|> Useful Research Web Sites
fhugdownloads:index#genealogy_research|> Downloads and Links > Genealogy Research
Especially some of the Services and Utilities.

[Jane]

I think travel with in the UK is probably more occupation based than perhaps much of the migration to the US, so if you have lost Cornish or Devon Miners you might well find them in South Wales, as the Welsh Coal mines flourished as the Cornish Tin Mines petered out, although earlier some went to Brazil, supposedly bringing them Football along with mining skills.

Agricultural labourers often move far further than you might think for especially after the 1865 changes in the New poor law, which made it a little easier to move around with out falling foul of removal orders. So you tend to have a work through parishes out from the local market town and not from the previous location.

[jmurphy]

I have census records which place members of my husband's family in Slapton, Brixham, South Pool, and Asprington in Devon; and Portsmouth and Portsea Island in Hampshire. Civil registrations are mostly in Kingsbridge, Totnes, and Stoke Damerel Registration districts. The only baptism and burial records I have collected so far are from Slapton.

One of my occupational puzzles is Thomas Elisha Coyde Knowles, who appears in the census in Slapton as a Shoe and Boot maker. However, he does not appear with the rest of his father's family in 1851. There is a possible match in Stokenham, apprenticed to a Cordwainer.

Then there is the problem of Thomas's brother Robert Henry, who was transported to Australia. Robert was apparently working as a fisherman when he stabbed his employer in 1861, but the census records in 1861 list his occupation as a Thatcher like his father (also named Robert). I have been collecting all the baptism records for Knowles children in Slapton. There are many who are listed as children of Robert (Thatcher) and wife Mary. It seems likely that the very youngest of them may be Robert Henry's children; the convict records indicate he had two children. I don't have marriage records for Robert Henry yet, so I don't have any other evidence that shows what his wife's name was.

But the big mystery is Thomas' daughter Augusta, who is one of the people who went to the US and then returned to England. She lived until she was 91, mostly in Slapton, but an announcement of her estate having gone through probate was published in the Gloucestershire Echo and they say she was a former resident of High street in Cheltenham.

Augusta and her husband Charles Elliott and son Cecil are listed as visitors in the 1881 Census in Brixham (in the household of her aunt) so this may be the missing puzzle piece that shows what their residence in 1881 might have been. But I'll need more evidence to find out.

The other big question I have is where Augusta might have been during the evacuation of the South Hams during WWII. She dies in April of 1947 and is referred to both in the National Probate calendar and the newspaper items as a resident of Slapton (The Myrtles). The other reference to her at The Myrtles is from an early 20th-century directory, so the question is, did she return to Slapton after the war, or was she simply referred to by her pre-War residence?

In the 1911 Census, Charles and Augusta appear in the household of her sister Janet White (the parish is indexed as 'Hapton', but the address is 'Slapton Kingsbridge'). I lost the directory page (it's on a frozen hard drive) that showed her as a resident of the Myrtles, but if I recall correctly, it was around 1915. Her husband dies around 1919.

Charles Elliott is listed as a grocer in the census, so it's a mystery why he would have moved to the USA to work in a mill town for a thread company. Yet somehow by 1947 Augusta leaves her sister an estate of over six thousand pounds. She obviously had some means all along because she pays for the ticket of her brother and his family to come to America. But where did that money come from?

So I'm on the lookout for records to bridge the gap between 1911 and 1947, and to solve the puzzle of where Charles and Augusta were between their marriage in 1878 and when they left for the USA in the mid-1880s.

I'm also wondering about who else may have been in the evacuation area. Many of the family who did not go to the US are in Hampshire in the 1911 Census; if the families remained there, they would not have been affected. (They were shipwrights and dockyard workers.)

As for Welsh coal miners, I don't have any connections, but I know how far afield they traveled in order to find work from reading about the Scofield mine disaster (Winter Quarters, Carbon County, Utah).

At any rate, Jane's point about how far Ag Labs can move is well-taken, because one of the grandsons of Robert Knowles the Thatcher, who was also a Thatcher, moved to the US. No surprise why, because many of the sale notices I've collected for cottages in Slapton, including the Myrtles, boast of their slate/stone roofs. There are still some thatched cottages in Slapton, however; if you look at the modern-day tourist information about the cottages that can be hired for your holiday, the thatched ones have stern warnings about how smoking is Not Allowed.

[ColeValleyGirl]

Cordwainer = Shoe Maker. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer

There are times I love a site where you don't have to show your workings
And you could make a question -- even self-answered -- out of this for another site -- just saying

[jmurphy]

Cordwainer = Shoe Maker. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer

There are times I love a site where you don't have to show your workings
And you could make a question -- even self-answered -- out of this for another site -- just saying

Oh, I'll mine this for several questions, not to worry!

But first I need to figure out how my brain got cross-wired, because somehow I was getting a Cordwainer confused with a cooper (barrel-maker).

Okay, that's got Thomas Elisha sorted out, anyway.

Edited to add: found this on Google Books

Devon: The Shire of the Sea Kings ... By Great Western Railway (published 1906)

[AdrianBruce]

Not at all helpful for Devon and not really matching in period either, but perhaps useful for someone: Carl Rogerson put together a series of "Stage-Coach Timetables in 1830's Cheshire" - see http://www.carlscam.com/coach.htm.

The warning here is that most people could not afford stage-coach travel. In fact, I think we underestimate people's walking abilities. A journal of a Nantwich shoe-maker(?) shows that one day he walked from Nantwich to Chester to hear a court case (nearly 20 miles) and back again in the same day. He was, if I recall correctly, anxious to see if he and his friends would be implicated in a trial of union members accused of illegal oath taking. Nor is this the only instance, as small boot & shoemakers from Nantwich (small applies to their business, not the shoes or their stature ) would regularly walk the 30-odd mile from Nantwich to the boot markets in Manchester if they couldn't afford the carters' fares. Though I don't think that was done in one day.

[jmurphy]

A 20-mile walk is not so bad in itself. As a teenager, I did a 26-mile walk for charity. The difficulty is the state of the road, especially when transporting goods to market.

I saw an article recently about the free range that children were allowed when playing. It has narrowed dramatically in the past century or so. I haven't chased down the actual report, but here's the writeup from the Daily Mail:

How children lost the right to roam in four generations

I wonder what the graphic would be, if we had the range for earlier periods.