When we are all migrants ………

It's an obvious observation but one that needs revisiting, and it is this .... dig deep and most of us can count a migrant in our family history.  

Ontario

And it has to be revisited because all too many think that migrants and migration belong to someone else.

In our family that migration began so far back that the details of the story are lost.  

But it began in the east Highlands perhaps at the start of the 19th century and is not over yet.  

For perhaps a century and more  we were on the move travelling south across Scotland, stopping for a generation, in a town or village, but always south, finally crossing the border around  1900.  

To Canada and the USA, 1871

And then in different stories fanning out across England with father settling in London in 1932. 

His brothers made homes in Birmingham, Ipswich,Penzance, and Surrey while one chose far flung places in different parts of the old Empire.

Nor has it finished.

l left London for Manchester, one of our sons for Warsaw and  a nephew for Australia.  

A testimonial, 1925

At the heart of each move by all of us has been work and a belief that the move would improve our lives.  

So, we are all economic migrants.  

And to these I can add the Italian side of the family who left the grinding poverty of Naples for Cambridge in the 1960s before moving back to Italy near the northern city of Milan.

Now as far as l know we were not fleeing from political oppression, or the fear of imprisonment, and the choices were free ones. 

That said one of my great uncles was migrated to Canada by The Derby Union which administered the Poor Law in Derby.  

To what extent he had a choice is now lost, but many young people who were sent to Canada and other parts of the old British Empire and some may have had only a tenuous role in the decision.  

They were and are the British Home Children and about 10% of Canadians can claim to be descended from a BHC. 

In the course of our search for him l have made many close friends in Canada, and have an extensive Canadian family descended from his sister who followed him out looking for work.  

Rosa, Naples, 1960

Our story isn't unusual and like many we also share the knowledge that our great-grandmother Eliza spent time in the workhouse as well as having her last child born in its infirmary.  Added to which all her surviving children spent time in the care of the same workhouse.

So we may not like it, but most of us come from poor families who  were agricultural labourers, domestic servants, factory hands, or itinerant traders, soldiers and sailors.

Our ancestors arrival in these islands may date from the Windrush or the 1970s, or stretch back through the Normans, Vikings, Saxons and Romans, to those Neolithic boat people and perhaps even further back to the Paleolithic.

Which brings me back to that opening observation, that it is easy to think that history is not messy, and that we can all track our roots back to an indigenous ancestor, which is as silly as thinking that we all once lived in a castle, or can count Lloyd George as a family member.

Pictures; Ontario 2015, courtesy of Saul Simpson, poster from the report of Cow Cross Mission, 1871, testimonial for Laura Boot, 1925 and Rosa, in Naples the day before she left for Britain, 1960, from the Simpson family collection.