Genealogy Forum UK

On Radio 4 this morning at 9.00am,as part of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time series, they covered the Lancashire Cotton Famine caused by the the mutual agreement between bosses & workers in the Lancashire cotton mills to boycott the slave produced cotton exported from the Confederate States during the American Civil War in the 1860s. It's an interesting programme in itself, if you can tolerate Melvyn Bragg, but I was thinking about the effect that the American Civil War had on the Black Country. Shipbuilding in the North West benefitted so presumably chain makers did as well. And as the Lancashire cotton mills closed down skilled workers may well have travelled South to the Black Country. How many Black Country Staffies have Lancashire Heeler in their ancestry line?

Thanks for the link SRD, I've downloaded the podcast so that I can listen to it at my leisure.

I don't have families travelling down to the Black Country from Lancashire, but some of my Dando line (originally from Somerset) came to Dudley then went to live in Atherton, Lancashire in the late 1880s. The men were coal miners with their daughters working in the cotton mills, so obviously the cotton industry picked up again after the American Civil War.

I'm looking forward to hearing this programme as I have a real interest in cotton mills.