19th Century Navvies in Britain - Irish or English?

This is an excerpt from an article titled The Navvy by Neil Storey in April's Family Tree Magazine:

Irish or English?

A popular misconception is that the navvies were predominantly of Irish stock but a study of 19th-century British railway contracts, which coincided with census returns (The Railway Navvy: 'That Despicable Race of Men'. by David Brooke, David & Charles, 1983), suggests the majority of navvies working in Britain were actually English. This may have been true, but Irish workers were never keen on any type of official registration or records, so the actual numbers at work in Britain cannot be accurately asecrtained. I think Brooke's remark that 'only the ubiquitous Irish can be regarded as a truly international force in railway constrcution' is true and is one of the few certain statements we can make about these workers.

Also Irish workers tended to stand out - Irish voices could be heard wherever navvies were found and, because they were more noticeable, they were oftenb blamed for disturbances and minor riots. Mix this with anti-Irish feelings and fears among the British populace throughout the 19th century and it's hardly surprising that navvies were all tarred with the same brush.

Railway engineer Peter Lecount said of navvies in 1831: 'These banditti, known in some parts of England by the name of "Navvies" or "Navigators", and in others that of "Bankers", are generally the terror of the surrounding country: they are as complete a class by themselves as the Gipsies. Possessed of all the daring recklessness of the Smuggler, without any of his redeeming qualities, their ferocious behaviour can only be equalled by the brutality of their language. It may be truly said, their hand is against every man, and before they have been long located, every man's hand is against them.'

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March article in The Harp

Gathering Your Stories Through The Harp

Pete Millington has launched a new family and community history feature in The Harp with an invitation to get involved online

Even before the Great Famine of the late 1840s there had been Irish migration to Wales, Scotland and England for many generations, if not centuries.

In my own family research I came across a family named O’Hagan who came to the West Midlands from Newry, County Down in the early 1800s. I discovered that my g-g-grandmother, Alice O’Hagan, was born in Bromsgrove in 1845, which suggests that the family were on the road in England before the famine years in Ireland. Studies on Irish migration suggest that many Irish people travelled all around Wales and England in particular, participating in seasonal agricultural labour. There are descriptions of people walking from western Ireland to places like Suffolk and Norfolk in East Anglia during this period, often travelling amongst cattle on the voyage across the Irish sea.

In various old census records, Alice O’Hagan’s father Patrick describes his trade alternatively as a ‘traveller’ and also a ‘salt hawker’. Further research informed me that the area of Droitwich in Worcestershire was a major salt producing area in the 19^th century, so Alice’s birth in Bromsgrove seems to fit well into my personal theory that the O’Hagan family might have been drawn to the salt industry and travelled from north Worcestershire to Birmingham where they settled close to the canal basin in Lee Bank.

One of the things I enjoy about family history is tracing the records, a task which has become easier in the last few years with several subscription or pay-as-you-go websites such as Ancestry or Genes Reunited. But more enjoyable is filling in the gaps around the records with family anecdotes, photographs or even one’s own imagination. Alice O’Hagan, for instance, married John Millington from Salop (Shropshire) whose father was a shoe maker. In my imagination I have created a scenario where I see Alice going to the shoe maker with her father’s boots for repair on their arrival in Birmingham. I am sure to be completely wrong about that ever being reality, but the idea adds colour to my picture of these poor ragged people making a life for themselves in a new country.

The marriage between Alice and John took place at St Mathew’s Church in Nechells in 1870. St Matthew’s is a protestant church although family anecdote suggests that Alice O’Hagan’s catholic faith was later to become dominant in her family. Her son (my great grandfather) Terence’s funeral took place at St Peter’s RC in Ladywood and her sister Mary O’Hagan, a spinster of William Street in Lee Bank, was involved in St Patrick’s church on Dudley Road.

A common theme of Brummie historian Professor Carl Chinn is the ease with which the early Irish community (and indeed other migrant communities) mixed with the wider population of the expanding city. Whilst there may have been localised populations of Irish immigrants around the main Catholic churches, there are also many stories of Irish families well and truly mixed in with their English neighbours and other racial and cultural groups. Something which should be continually celebrated in my opinion.

Did your ancestors arrive in Birmingham in the 19^th century or was your Brummie Irish family part of a more recent wave of arrivals to the city? Let us know your family history stories for future editions of The Harp.

Readers are invited to join our Facebook page and visit our blog:

Visit the blog at

http://harp-gathering.blogspot.co.uk/

Join our Facebook group at

http://www.facebook.com/groups/420135884725856/

Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at spaghetti.editorial@yahoo.com

 

February article in The Harp

Gathering Your Stories Through The Harp

Pete Millington has launched a new family and community history feature in The Harp with an invitation to get involved online

According to official figures reported in the Index of the Irish Census of 1861, there had been a decrease in the population of Ireland of 4.2 per cent between 1851 and 1861. The largest decrease was amongst the Irish speaking population of Connaught who had been most adversely affected by the Great Hunger of the late 1840s.

On the other side of the Irish Sea, the General Report of the 1861 Census for England and Wales shows us that 601,634 people recorded in that Census said that they had been born in Ireland. The highest number were recorded in the counties of Lancashire (217,320 or 8.9% of the total population), followed by Middlesex (80,499 or 3.6%) and then Yorkshire (50,664 or 2.5%). Other counties close to London had high Irish populations (Kent 21,671 and Surrey 22,467), as did Staffordshire (19,176), Cheshire (28,613), Durham (27,719) and Northumberland (15,034). Warwickshire was 9^th highest with 14,297 residents of Irish birth in 1861 (2.5% of the total population).       

Some of my own ancestors were among those fourteen thousand Irish born residents of Warwickshire in 1861. My three times great grandmother Mary Flynn from Galway was a widow living with her seven children at Northwood Street in Birmingham in 1861. Their ages ranging from 6 to 24. The same family were living at Smith Street, Newtown in 1871. Another branch of my father’s Irish ancestors were the Finns who can also be found living in the Newtown area during the middle to late 19^th century.

But whilst many Irish people came to live in the West Midlands following the post-Famine decades, many also settled here before then. Thousands of Irish people came to England in search of agricultural work in the first half of the 19^th century and a lot of these people put down their roots in urban areas like Birmingham, Coventry and the Black Country which were expanding due to industrialisation. In my own family research I discovered a great, great grandmother named Alice O’Hagan who was born in Bromsgrove in 1847. Her father was variously listed as a ‘traveller’ and on another occasion also a salt hawker. The O’Hagan family settled in the Lee Bank district in the late 1800s, on Wharf Street in Birmingham’s thriving canal area.

This sort of evidence can not only help us to learn about our own ancestors but also helps us to create an early history of the Irish and Irish-descended communities of the region and I hope that readers of The Harp will contribute to the rich collective story as this new feature evolves throughout the year of The Gathering in 2013 and beyond.

I wish to thank Frank Callery of Piltown, Co. Kilkenny who has already contributed an enquiry for our new feature. Frank is hoping to trace descendants of his mother’s uncle, James Halpin, who settled in Birmingham with his wife. The couple may have had two daughters and a son.

Frank told me “James was born in 1905 and lived at Dominick Street and 183 Parnell Street in Dublin. My mother remembers that he worked in a rubber or tyre factory in Birmingham, which may have been Dunlop.

“Two of the Halpin brothers were fighting for Irish freedom in 1916, another brother Christy, was fighting out in France; my mother remembers that he was wounded. Certificates have just been issued by the Irish Government for John and Francis Halpin, for their service in 1916 and the War or Independence in 1922. If there are Halpins still in Birmingham, we would like to send them copies.

If you can help to trace the Halpin family in the West Midlands, please get in touch with me, Pete Millington. Frank Callery would like to get in touch as these family history documents may be of interest to them.    

Readers are invited to join our Facebook page and visit our blog:

Visit the blog at

http://harp-gathering.blogspot.co.uk/

Join our Facebook group at

http://www.facebook.com/groups/420135884725856/

Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at spaghetti.editorial@yahoo.com

January 2013 article in The Harp

Join The Harp at The Gathering 2013

Pete Millington launches a new family and community history feature in The Harp with an invitation to get involved online

This year promises to be a very special year for people of Irish descent and heritage all over the world as Ireland celebrates a year-long event called The Gathering Ireland 2013.

Throughout 2013, Ireland will open its arms to hundreds of thousands of friends and family from all over the world, calling them home to gatherings in villages, towns and cities. Communities throughout Ireland will showcase and share the very best of Irish culture, tradition, business, sport, fighting spirit and the uniquely Irish sense of fun.

According to the event website over 70 million people worldwide claim Irish ancestry:

“The Gathering Ireland 2013 provides the perfect excuse to reach out to those who have moved away, their relatives, friends and descendants, and invite them home. The Gathering is the people’s party. It will kick off in spectacular style at the New Year’s Eve Festival in Dublin and will be celebrated through gatherings of the people and Ireland’s major festivals during 2013. After that it is over to you. It is in your hands. Be part of it.”

As someone of Irish descent brought up in Birmingham (my maternal grandparents emigrated from Dublin in the late 1930s and many of my father’s Brummie Catholic ancestors go back to the post-famine migrants who settled close to St Chad’s Cathedral in the 1850s), I have been keenly interested in tracing both my English and Irish roots for many years and through my personal research have been lucky and determined enough to have mined a rich seam of both record and anecdote.

For example, having been interested in disability history for many years and even written a book about the history of Birmingham’s Disability Resource Centre, I was astonished to discover my own g-g-grandfather John McDonnell was a co-founder of a union called the League of the Blind in Dublin in the 1890s.

In future editions of The Harp I hope to share this story and some of my other family research with readers, but more importantly we wish to invite you to tell us your family stories of Irish migration to the West Midlands and their descendants.

Here at The Harp we want to celebrate and participate in The Gathering Ireland 2013 by sharing stories and photographs of Irish people in the West Midlands and also by sharing tips about Irish family history research. To help us build an evolving archive of West Midlands Irish family history, we have also set up a Facebook page and a blog so we can publish all of your stories and pictures online, whether or not they make it in their entirety into The Harp.

Visit the blog at

http://harp-gathering.blogspot.co.uk/

Join our Facebook group at

http://www.facebook.com/groups/420135884725856/

Please send your stories and photos to Pete Millington at spaghetti.editorial@yahoo.com

Pete Millington

Immigration to America

Many thousands of Irish families moved to the USA and one of the best websites to help you search for your emigrating anestors is www.ellisisland.org which contains surviving records for the Ellis Island Immigration Processing Centre in New York Bay. Open from 1892-1954, it was the first federal immigration inspection centre.

Many pre-1897 records (including those from its predecessor the Castle Garden Immigration Centre) were destroyed in a fire, but the records after 1897 survive and include ships' manifests.

The free Castle Garden database at www.castlegarden.org allows the visitor to search surviving records for immigrants beween 1820 and 1913.

 

Irish and Scottish Ancestors

A new website hosted by the department of Arts, Hertage and the Gaeltacht at www.irishgenealogy.i.e includes nearly three million pre-1900 Catholic and Church of Irealnd records free of charge.

For a list of what records are covered visit www.irishgenealogy.ie/record_list.html

The Irish Genealogy toolkit at www.irish-genalogy-toolkit.com provides an introduction to Irish records.

The two surviving Irish census reurns (1901 and 1911) are available for free at www.census.nationalarchives.ie

For a trascription of Griffith's Property Valuation of 1847-1864 visit www.askaboutireland.i.e

For Scottish records, a good starting point is The National Library of Scotland (www.nls.uk)   which has many free records including more than 700 digitised Post Office directories from 1773-1911 ( www.digital.nls.uk/directories )