Opinion please: 1875 travel and having babies
This family I am researching is giving me hesitation. 1. Would a coal miner in 1875 move his family from Shrewsbury, Shropshire to Wigan, Lancashire? I google mapped it. It's about 1 hour 45 min on the m6 or you can walk it in about 21 hours. Why would he do that. It's so far! 2. This is the biggest family I've researched. Could a Mom have 16 children between 1856 and 1881? That's one about every year and a half. Technically possible but do I have 2 families?
Thanks for your opinions! I'm new here.
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A migration from Shewsbury to Wigan is very plausible. You could do some more research into possible reasons: maybe a new mine opened in Wigan, or one in Shrewsbury closed. I live in New Zealand but my ancestors are British or European: many of my ancestors left everything they knew behind and spent months on a ship bound for New Zealand.
16 children by a single women is possible but not common. I have a 3x great-grandmother and another female relative who each bore this number of children: both lived in the late 19th century and neither had twins or triplets. If the names of either or both the father or mother are common you should verify that you haven't mixed up two people or couples with the same name(s).
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Moving that kind of distance was not common but certainly happened. Many of the instances I have seen involved coal miners, e.g. moving from Devon to Yorkshire - a long way in those days.
I concur with @A van Helsdingen's comments about numbers of children. I have seen quite a few instances where apparent large numbers of children derived from mixing two families with parents of the same or similar names - sometimes widely spread geographically!
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Just to add by agreement to both of the responses provided.
It is always advisable to check carefully in case two families have been confused and/or combined into one. However, the census itself should provide answers to your queries - along with the website of the General Record Office for England & Wales.
In the case of the former, the census should show the different birthplaces of all those in the family unit. I was once convinced I had mixed-up a family, especially when two of the children appeared to be born in the United States, but the rest of the family in England. However, the census confirmed that was the case. It appears the father got a mining job in Pennsylvania and he (or his wife!) must have been unhappy there. The family were there for just a few years before returning to the north-east of England. So, try to find your family / individuals in different census returns to see if that confirms (by their stated place of birth) they moved around the country.
On the point of having sixteen children, my maternal grandmother was one of thirteen and I'm sure I have encountered larger families. Obviously, the younger the woman was at marriage the far greater the chance of her having many children (say 16 over a period of 25 years). The GRO index (free to register)* allows you to see the mother's maiden name against all records from 1837 (unlike other indexes), so if the children have the same maiden name against their birth registration records it is likely they are all siblings - although an exception is where two brothers (from the same area) married two sisters: very confusing in confirming the different family units!
*Register from this page: https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/login.asp
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Thanks for your comments! This is the most help I've had in a long time, I checked the GRO and the mother's maiden name for all children is Dunning. That's good. I'm having trouble with the census because it appears that a lot of the children died, thus mussing the census'. Street names have helped a bit with that. But one was at the methodist, just one. And i cant find any baptisms for others. I even invented a new form to try to help me analyze.
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