""In article <[email protected]>, Eileen Phelps <[email protected]> writes Rod Neep says, "Add to that, the in 1820 period Nottingham suffered a majordepression. Starvation! literally. It is the story of the early 1800s." Is there a Web site that gives this kind of information? I am well awarethat the Industrial Revolution was a time of great upheaval and hardship, but I think it would be helpful to know more specific ups and downs. The Nottingham Date Book is a superb resource for this sort of information: for example in 1819: Few years are more distinctly remembered by the working classes than this. It was one of deep and widely diffused distress. In the winter and spring, the demand for our manufactures was very inactive, and as the summer advanced it became almost stagnant. The outward manifestations of suffering, amongst the framework knitters especially, assumed various forms and excited general commiseration. Many solicited contributions from door to door, crowds besieged the overseers’ offices, and some, it is be- lived, sank altogether beneath the pressure of their calamities. In August, the two-needle hands paraded the streets in procession almost every day. On the 13th, upwards of 600 were thus assembled together, and on the 16th, a gentleman who had the curiosity to count them as they marched by, numbered 5057 men, As the procession passed through the chief streets on the 19th, it attracted more than usual attention from the circumstance of a great number of women marching at its head. In the course of the same week, the unemployed published an appeal to the Lord Lieutenant and the noblemen and gentry of the county, in which 1819 they stated, amongst other things, “ From the various and low prices given by our employers, we have not, after working from sixteen to eighteen hours per day, been able to earn more” than from four to seven shillings per week, to maintain our wives and families upon, to pay taxes, house-rent, &c., which has driven us to the necessity of applying for parochial aid, which after all has not in many instances left us sufficient to supply the calls of nature, even with the most parsimonious economy; and though we have substituted meal and water, or potatoes and salt, for that more wholesome food an Englishman’s table used to abound with, we have repeatedly retired, after a hard day’s labour, and been under the necessity of putting our children supperless to bed, to stifle the cries of hunger : nor think that we would give this pic- ture too high a colouring, when we can most solemnly declare, that for the last eighteen months we have scarcely known what it is to be free from the pangs of hunger.” Subsequently, bodies of men, with their wives and children, perambulated the streets, carrying boards, on which were inscribed, “ Pity our distresses I” “We ask for bread !” “ Pity our children !” Appeals like these naturally excited attention, and of the numerous projects devised to meet them, and to permanently improve the men’s condition, there are several to which reference must be made." That is just part of one article. It goes on in more detail, and with many more articles. If you had ancestors in Nottingham at any time up to 1884 (when the book was published), then it is *must* to read, as it describes so much that your ancestors would have seen and lived through. Absolutely fascinating reading. >What I'm trying to say is that a depression in England generally might >not affect a specific city until a few years later. Or perhaps a >specific trade. I have heard that framework knitters suffered a great >deal, but when did that happen in Nottingham? In the period 1795 to 1822 Again, there is *lots* about it in the Nottingham Date Book, and also about the Luddites and their activities.