From: "Della Markey" <dellamar@bigpond.net.au> > I am trying to find out why my MARKEY ancestor's moved from > Gloucestershire to Bradford in the 1870's. Was there a scheme to > entice southern agricultural workers to the Industrial North? If so, > can anyone point me in the right direction to find out more? Or can > anyone offer a further suggestion?> The answer is quite simple - for employment. My great-grandparents in the 1871 census were in the beautiful city of Bath. By 1881 they were living in what then would have been the grimy hellhole of industrial Bradford! My gt-grandfather was a cloth weaver and in the 1870s the West Country cloth trade was being severely hit by the huge new mills, with their vastly superior technology, of Yorkshire and Lancashire. My grandfather had no choice but to move to where the work was, even if the environment was totally different. Likewise, thousands of agricultural workers were leaving the land, where the wages were low, and going into the mills and factories of the towns and cities. They went to Bradford and other industrial towns for the work and in the expectation of higher wages. The downside was that very often they found themselves living in grossly overcrowded and insanitary conditions. In Victorian times the north-south migration was largely the other way, since the great majority of the industry - steel, wool, cotton, shipbuilding etc - was all in the north. -- Roy Stockdill Guild of One-Name Studies: www.one-name.org Newbies' Guide to Genealogy & Family History: www.genuki.org.uk/gs/Newbie.html "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." OSCAR WILDE