Thanks to response to my canal query. My ancester I belive, was born 1775 Shropshire and turned up in Tring, where he married 1801 and had his family. This was as the Shropshire and then Grand Union canals were being constructed. Vivien

There is a very useful and readable source online, that includes a footnote: " 5. It is often believed that the workforce was mainly Irish navvies. This is not so. At this time the workforce was mainly local agricultural workers, the traditional navvy being a product of the railway-building era." I think this is logical, for a number of reasons, not least the greater scale of railway projects, but also that the potato famine in Ireland 1845-52 that drove many to emigrate to the usa also probably drove many to England just at a time when railway building was underway and could use exploitable cheap labour. The alternative being starvation. The canal source is at http://gerald-massey.org.uk/Canal/c_chapter_07.htm The tring summit cutting was a deep and troublesome job, lasting years, as it was started almost as soon as the canal construction started in the early 1790s, but Landslips, flooding, and the like, saw to it that work continued through the 1790s. They had found that the cut went through an aquifer. By 1801 attention had shifted to the Blisworth tunnel (while loads continued to be carried by horse drawn railway over the hill at blisworth). Your ancestor might well have been at tring at the right time, before his marriage. Depending on where in shropshire he was, it might have been the shrewsbury canal that he worked on initially, rather than the later shropshire union canal (SU), although what are now parts of the SU were built earlier. Google for "shrewsbury and newport canal". This had an inclined plane, lifting boats up a hill in tanks using engine power, that operated well into the 20th century - one of the wonders of the waterways. Dave Beakhust On 6 April 2014 16:57:18 Vivien Emons <emofenn@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > Thanks to response to my canal query. My ancester I belive, was born 1775 Shropshire and turned up in Tring, where he married 1801 and had his family. This was as the Shropshire and then Grand Union canals were being constructed. > Vivien > > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to SOG-UK-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message