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.

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