23/10/2024
If you have miners among your ancestors, mark your calendar and book your ticket. Kay is an excellent speaker and this will be a well researched and informative talk.
Do you have miners in your family tree? Have you looked at the census entries, wondered what these places were like and what living in a two-roomed house meant?
Unlike most other industrial workers, a miner’s employer was also likely to have been the landlord. The location of coal mining was determined by a combination of geology and technology and miners’ homes needed to be near their place of work. Many mining communities were isolated villages of basic rows of houses with few amenities, but this is not the whole story.
“In all the coalfields there is a well-marked difference between the oldest houses and the newest, between the worst and the best. But there are also great differences between the different coalfields.” Ballantyne Royal Commission on Housing (1917) [Cd 8731] Chapter XIV, para. 870, p 126.
This talk will be a trip through time and space from west to east, from Ardeer on the Ayrshire coast in the mid-nineteenth century across the industrial heartlands of Lanarkshire in the central belt to mining villages in the Lothians in the 1920s. Along the way we will look at time slices for selected census years and explore the differences.
