Together with lead partner Global Link, CDEC, Liverpool World Centre, Cheshire Global Learning, Lancaster City Museums, Lancaster University and Crossing Footprints in Manchester, Migration Stories North West will train and support community researchers to uncover and document some of their local migration history. Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, volunteers will research and document online 100 stories of migration to and from the Northwest of England since the Romans.
These 100 stories will be shared on a new website, and will include narrative stories, digital stories and oral histories, as later in the project, young people will be involved, gathering oral histories from within their own families and communities. Volunteers will conduct archival research to discover regional stories of migration, including stories such as that provided by Lancaster City Museums, of Robert Rhodes from Chipping who left for Jamaica in 1726 to make his fortune on the slave trade plantations of the West Indies.
Project Co-ordinator Alison Lloyd Williams said, ‘We are delighted to have been awarded this funding to be able research and document migration. The UK has always been a country of migration, with people moving around the world as explorers, traders, colonisers, workers, slave traders, but also with people moving here from around the world first as invaders, then later as refugees, and as workers, both to rebuild the economy after the Second World War, and now to provide, amongst other things, employment services in most areas of the economy, including in the health, care and social sector.’
Gisela Renolds, Director of Global Link said, ‘People often feel threatened by migration, and think of it as people from ‘abroad’ coming to the UK. Yet Britain is top ten in the world in terms of emigration, that is, people moving and settling in other countries. Indeed, the fact that the UK has almost 1.2 million job vacancies demonstrates that the UK very much needs immigration of working age people.’
If you are interested in volunteering for this project please email office@cdec.org.uk or info@globallink.org.uk
You can also find more information on the Migration North West website: https://www.migrationstoriesnw.uk/