Advanced Genealogy
Moving Here Migration
Britain’s Liberal Approach to Migration
Many of us will discover immigrant blood in our Family History. Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Jews, Huguenots and eastern Europeans all settled in Britain well before the twentieth century. It has long been a haven for those fleeing persecution or simply seeking a better life for their family. Regardless of hysterical recent reports about ‘floods’ or rapacious people descending upon and despoiling our green and pleasant land, immigration is nothing new. Britain has a proud tradition of accepting and integrating displaced peoples, and has, with a few exceptions, adopted a liberal, relaxed attitude towards them. So liberal, in fact that unlike in other European countries, there were few restrictions on immigration until the twentieth century, and no compulsion on aliens to register their arrival. This makes tracking your relatives and their reason for coming to Britain a difficult, though by no means impossible, task. You may have to travel way back in time to find them however.
Migrants Escaping Prosecution
After 1066 there was a steady flow of migrants to Britain, mainly from France. The flow quickened during the sixteenth century, for a variety of reasons – Protestants left the Low Countries to escape persecution, for example. More significant was the surge of Huguenot immigrants from France, where they were being hounded and massacred. Estimates suggest around 50,000 people crossed the channel between 1540 and 1600. These foreigners were welcomed for the new skills and crafts they brought to England. Most of them settled in or around London, though some made their home elsewhere. When Louis XIV intensified the maltreatment of the Huguenots after 1680, even more sought sanctuary across the Channel. Because of this, many people will find that they have Huguenot ancestors, even Huguenot names that have been anglicised over the centuries. So those of you, who yarned during school lessons at the merest mention of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, or the siege of La Rochelle, could have been blissfully unaware that these were events that directly shaped who you are.
People kept on coming, mostly from mainland Europe. The French Revolution created an influx of French nobility avoiding the guillotine. By the end of the nineteenth century most major towns and cities possessed small communities of immigrants: Polish and Russian Jews who had fled the pogroms of the Russian Empire; Germans who had escaped the revolutions and uprisings of their mid-nineteenth century homeland (though many of them would be expelled during the First World War); and smaller, close-knit communities of Italians.
The biggest community by far was the Irish in Liverpool. The 1851 census reveals that 22 per cent of the city’s population was born in Ireland. However, though they formed close-knit communities, the Irish cannot be considered ‘foreigners’, until 1921 the whole of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. Many of these immigrants had arrived during the famine years of the 1840s, though for a long time before then they had migrated in considerable numbers.