Chris Paton explores some of the reasons our ancestors left Britain and Ireland to live and work across the globe and provides resources to help you trace your family’s journey
Two of my most treasured possessions are letters written by my Belfast-born grandfather Ernest Graham, who I never met, he having died in 1972 (when I was just an infant) in an industrial accident in Pembroke Dock, Wales. In the first, written in late 1955 to two friends some fifteen years before I was born, he noted that he had been trying unsuccessfully to gain employment on a job in Jamaica, and at the end of the letter, he signed off with “I remain with itchy feet, Ernest Graham, MASALAAMA SEDEKIE!”, an Arabic farewell.
Ernest regularly travelled the globe whilst working as a welder, spending time in Saudi Arabia and South Africa, and in the second letter he talked of having to sell a camera that he purchased in ‘Arabia’ to make ends meet, a sale which “nearly broke my heart”. The work was sometimes dangerous – both my mother and uncle recalled how as children they went to Durban and Johannesburg in South Africa with their parents in the early Fifties, with Ernest having gained employment with a company called Wesso, only to have to flee the country overnight when riots erupted in the area where they were based.
Employed overseas
Many of our ancestors and relatives will have similarly ended up overseas in the past for employment reasons.
In many cases, travel overseas may have been for a temporary position, as illustrated by my grandfather’s example, for others the decision may have been to pack up their bags and to leave everything behind forever. A decision to emigrate could be rewarded with immense success, whilst for others, deployment overseas was not a choice at all, but an imposition. In some cases, the dreams of family members abroad ended in total failure, followed with a return back to their original country of origin, but only if that was an affordable option open to them.
Investors & indentured
One of the biggest drivers of early emigration from the UK was, of course, the British Empire.
Those travelling to Britain’s colonies did so for various reasons. Many were colonists who had made a personal financial investment in pursuit of new opportunities for employment and the acquisition of land. Others were indentured servants, who were bound to an employer for a contracted period of time. Some of these servants had little choice, as prisoners under sentence of deportation, but many al
