My Family History

Elsewhere on this blog, I've tried to tell the story of the White and Cox families, and how most of them left the Huntingdonshire villages that their forebears had lived in for generations, to start new lives in London, Stoke and Nottingham. In this post, I want to tell the story of how one of the Cox children, John George Cox, chose to leave the village of Woodhurst for the growing railway town of Swindon. This time, I will also explore one generation further to show how that migration went even further for his daughter - to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and, tragically, to the bottom of it as well. The railway comes to Swindon There is a good choice of books, online posts and even museums explaining how the Great Western Railway transformed the Wiltshire market town of Swindon into a railway town. In summary, its Chief Engineer Brunel and his associate Daniel Gooch recommended Swindon as the site for the GWR's central repair works. Construction started in 1841 and in ...

In a previous post , I mapped the migration of much of my great great grandfather's family, the Whites, away from the Huntingdonshire village of Bluntisham, to the cities of London, Nottingham and Stoke, in the last half of the nineteenth-century.  My grandmother's grandmother, Jane Cox, married her husband, William White, in 1851. For this next post, I have again researched the historical records to see if the pattern of internal migration in William White's family is repeated in the history of the family of Jane Cox,   who originally lived in the neighbouring Huntingdonshire village of Woodhurst.  Church St. and South St. - the two streets of Woodhurst - as mapped in 1888  The nine Cox siblings While William White was one of seven siblings, Jane Cox was one of nine. As the previous post illustrated,  Jane and William had married in London but then returned to their Huntingdonshire roots after just a few years to raise their family in Jane's home village o...