Journey

 

Our recent stay in Clun and many visits to The White Horse Inn [blog posts passim] prompted me to ease myself back into my family tree researches after a break of over a year - or is it two? Tempus does fugit without due warning at my age. A realisation struck me about the apparent mobility of family members across the Marches, the Midlands and Wales back in the nineteenth century which, given their poverty, I'd always wondered about; when the penny dropped: the railways. Also, when you look at the map, all the areas of concern to my familial archaeology are within relatively short distances of each other, and connected by what was then a comprehensive rail network. Pictured is my latest little acquisition: a facsimile of Bradshaw's Guide of the 1860s, which I bought to try and flesh out some of the travel background of the time. Using this with some of the other books of railway history I have to hand, I hope to get a better flavour for the movements of people at the time in order to put some more flesh on the bones of my family's past.

I took a quick skim through the book when it arrived today and lit upon the entry for Stourbridge, where I spent three very happy and productive years as a young art student in the latter half of the 1970s [blog posts also passim]. It mentions Stourbridge itself, The Lye, and Cradley (Heath), which it describes as '[a] village, in the vicinity of which some hops are grown...' - a far cry from the heavily industrial town that grew through the late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries; which further reinforces my realisation that life back in the mid-nineteenth century was lived more village by village, and the movements between them were made increasingly easier and more natural via the newly burgeoning railway and road transport network. Anyhow, as I gradually ease myself back into my family tree, as always, I'll keep you posted...