My Family History

In other posts on this blog , I've told the story of the White and Cox families, and how, in the last half of the nineteenth century, most of them chose to leave their Huntingdonshire villages to build new lives in London and other towns and cities.  One of those villagers was my grandmother's grandmother, Harriet White. In the 1870s, she found work as a cook in some of the big London hotels where she met - and married - Edward Swift, a butcher's assistant . This post starts to tell the story of where his Swift family first had its roots - on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. The Isle of Sheppey - from Bagshaw's Directory 1847 and the Ordnance Survey of 1896. The Isle of Sheppey - its name derived from "Sheep Island" in Old English - is mainly low-lying grazing land on the north coast of Kent,  next to the Thames Estuary. As such, it's not surprising that some local families made their living through grazing animals and selling their meat as butchers. And that...

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 ...