> Hi listers, > > Whilst working on expanding my wife's Bedfordshire lines and tracing > them through the 1851 to 1901 censuse - I noticed that several > families seem to have moved to Derbyshire broadly between 1871 and > 1891. > > I have been puzzling this one for a while and today came across yet > another family that seems to have done the same. > > So my question is was there a concerted effort to move families to > Derbyshire or is this something the families did on their own? Most of the rural counties in the south and west were suffering from an agricultural depression. All the jobs were in industry in the north and north midlands. So you had the choice - stay and starve, or move and eat. There were some actual schemes to transfer labour - as in the 1830s, when clergymen arrnaged moves of whole families to the cotton mills. This was an experiment and well documented. Once it had shown success, the moving was usually left to the individual, though in some cases, groups from one village got together and decided to try it. Derbyshire offered some textile jobs, and plenty in mining - after all, if a man could dig the fields he could dig the coal and iron out.