Exodus to a new world

The scene is an overgrown churchyard in the small village of Hauxwell in Wensleydale on a hot blue Indian summer's day. A man with a red baseball cap is trampling down the long grass and thick nettles to peer at the almost illegible inscriptions on leaning gravestones.

His intentness indicates more than idle curiosity. His name is Gerard Hunt and he is on a fortnight's visit to the Dales from his home near Toronto in Canada. If you were to ask Gerard, "Who do you think you are?" the reply would be to indicate the memorials to the generations who lie buried in this ground and in other similar Dales churchyards.

"My mother's side of the family – the Plewes – emigrated from this very village in 1850," says Gerard. "My father's side are the Hunts from Muker in Swaledale, and I've found out that I'm also descended from the Aldersons, another great Dales name. Last night, over dinner in Leyburn, I discovered a distant cousin. It seems that pretty much every Dales family is inter-related. It's not so much a family tree as a web."

That web eventually spread to all corners of the earth. And the closeness of the Dales ties which often bound these people is shown by the fact that a visit to a particular graveyard in the American West will reveal the same names and families chiselled on the gravestones as on those in Swaledale.

These doughty emigrants had qualities which for one reason or another were stifled or thwarted at home. Once they had established themselves in foreign fields with broader horizons, they came into their own. Gerard's ancestors built corn mills, textile mills and sawmills in Canada. Others set up coal mines in New Zealand, tended herds of sheep in Australia, or joined those great trailblazing wagon trains across America to begin cattle ranching and earn a better living off the land.

Glenys Marriott, who has been studying this great movement of Dales people, says that about 12,000 people like Gerard's ancestors left Arkengarthdale, Swaledale and Wensleydale during the 19th century. In 1821, some 15,000 people were recorded as living in the northern Dales. But 90 years later emigration and departures for destinations closer to home such as Lancashire and the West Riding cut that figure by half.

It was an exodus of potential and vigour which could be ill-afforded. Most of those departing for good were in their teens and twenties and they left behind an ageing population. What became of the pioneers is a story that's long been hidden away in archives of private family letters. But now the fascinating accounts of these trail-blazers has been researched by the Upper Dales Family History Group. They have brought it all together in a book which follows in detail the stories of over 100 Dales families who uprooted themselves from the familiar places to test themselves in uncharted and challenging territory.

Glenys Marriott, the chair of the history group, says: "People did some amazing things. From the letters we learn, for example, that these wagon trains trundling westwards across America were so long that children – they were usually forced to walk because possessions took up the space on wagon – found themselves unable to keep up. They ended up in the wagon train following behind, and sometimes parents wouldn't see their children again for a month."

Some things that came out in the letters were family secrets, and have been kept out of the book. "We have to be very careful about confidentiality where people who are still living are concerned," Glenys insists. "But where those concerned are long dead the stories can at last be told."

One such tale is that of the Longstroth family, who lived at Arncliffe in Littondale and left Liverpool for America in 1842. Stephen Longstroth became a Mormon, and over the next dozen years he wrote letters to his family back in the Dales describing his journey after landing in New Orleans. In 1848, for example, he told of fighting a mob who were trying to drive Mormons from the city. Soon afterwards he became part of the legendary Brigham Young's pioneering group who trekked to Salt Lake City and set up their Mormon Temple.

But his letters home omitted a very important fact. He had married his three daughters off to the same man, one Willard Richards, in a single wedding. Polygamy, at that time, was part of the Mormon faith, but news of the marriages would have been deeply upsetting to his Dales relatives.

Another fascinating story told in the book is that of the Keartons of Swaledale, who emigrated to the Caribbean and purchased a half-share in a sugar and coffee plantation on the island of St Vincent. Two centuries later the site of the plantation still carries the famous Swaledale name, being known as Kearton's Bay. Less recalled these days, however, is their use of slaves on the plantation.

One reason for many people emigrating in Victorian times was the gradual decline of the Dales lead mining and quarrying industries. No family illustrates this better than the Milners, a large clan based for

centuries around Muker and Thwaite and said to be one of the Twelve Tribes of Swaledale.

When the lead mines began to be worked out in the 1800s, many Milners set off across the Atlantic, finding work in Wisconsin. But they weren't the only Dales folk to aim for Wisconsin, according to Glenys Marriott.

"In the Yorkshire Dales most people were tenant farmers and could never afford to buy their land. But in America they could, which was a big, big attraction. We've found stories of a Wisconsin graveyard that is almost identical to Grinton in Swaledale. Same names, same families, living in the same American village. It's amazing."

That village was called New Diggins, in Lafayette County, where lead mining began in 1824. The lead miners from

Swaledale, it seems, virtually uprooted themselves en masse when their lead seams were exhausted and sailed across the Atlantic to find a new life.

The list of burials at the Leadmine Primitive Methodist Church Cemetery in New Diggings could be from any village in Swaledale with old-established local names like Bainbridge, Peacock, Harker, Pratt, Dent and Cherry.

One family from Wensleydale, the Horns, ended up sailing all the way to New Zealand to use their mining skills. When their ship dropped anchor in Auckland, they were told that the Maori people were at war, and so the Horns moved north to Whangarei to prospect for gold but accidentally struck a coal seam.

Later, they, too, started lead-mining, employing the same skills they had learned in the Dales.

But what of the Metcalfes? They are the biggest family to emerge from the Yorkshire Dales, and the Metcalfe Society is the largest one-name society in the world.

Stories of the Metcalfes would fill several volumes, but one deserves a special place in Glenys's book. It concerns James Metcalfe, from West Witton in Wensleydale. His travels as a soldier had taken him to the island of St Helena, the small Atlantic island 1,200 miles off the coast of Africa famous as the final prison of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Metcalfe was a carpenter who wound up making furniture for the exiled French Emperor and, in 1822, was to construct his coffin.

Back in Hauxwell churchyard, Gerard Hunt says: "I'm directly descended from the Metcalfes, too." He looks out across Wensleydale to the prominent whaleback of Penhill.

"What strikes me about this part of the Dales is how very similar it looks to where the emigrants settled in my part of Canada. The Plewes, on my mother's side, operated a grist mill there but

they must have felt very much at home, as though they were still at home in the Dales."

Those Who Left the Dales, edited by Glenys Marriott, Upper Dales Family History Group, 12.50. www.yps-publishing.co.uk or phone 01904 431213. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is 2.75.

YP MAG 23/10/10