A comparison of kinship family survival in York and Swaledale in the nineteenth century

Kinship networks were fundamental in importance to family life in both the urban and rural settings in nineteenth-century England. They could also be crucial in facilitating the process of migration. This thesis explores the ways in which kinship families over the nineteenth century responded to the stimulus to migrate. Kinship families are defined as several households in a community headed by people with the same surname who were related by lineage or marriage. Groups of people are quantified by a simple numerical index (surname index), then tracked across historical time using decennial census data, baptismal parish registers and memorial inscriptions. The surname index is an innovative powerful demographic tool for analysing, measuring and comparing sectors of the population within and between different communities and across time. People induced to migrate could follow the path of others who had gone before. The index in this study has been used to apply a measure to such chain migration of people with the same surname moving into York and out of Swaledale in the Northern Pennines.

Migrant families came into York from mid-century to work on the railways or in flight from Ireland at the time of the Irish potato famine, and out of rural Swaledale during collapse of the lead-mining industry. Marked rural-urban differences are found in these migrations. Railway kinship families formed a new community which grew for the remainder of the century. Irish families arrived en masse and concentrated in an impoverished slum district of York. Relatives often chose to live in close proximity. Holding of land was key to survival for Swaledale families. Predominantly large kinship families migrated out of Swaledale to other mining areas including North America.

The thesis furthers the debate about migration and kinship by showing that the impetus to migrate could affect kinship families in different ways from non-kinship families, and that complementary quantifiable chain migrations of related kin gathered pace into an urban and out of a rural setting during the nineteenth century.