M is for Migration – a shared endeavour and hangout-on-air

Our joint project this year is focussing on the topic of migration. Each participant is tailoring the activities to their own needs, working through some of the suggestions on our Inspirations Sheets (which can be downloaded from our members’ area) and sharing their journey through the project.

Migration has had an impact on all of our places. Clearly, total populations are altered by movement in and out of an area but consider who is moving in and out. Does your place lose large numbers of young workers? Or can you identify particular ethnic groups entering your place? How would that have affected life for the community at the time?

Some of us are tracing the stories of individual migrants. What motivated them to move? What was attracting them to your place? Or prompting them to leave it? Then there is methodology – how are you tracing your migrants and recording information? What sources have you found useful for migration research? Can you share these with other members? For example, many of my emigrants go to Canada so I have found this site, enabling searches of Canadian Land Grants, very helpful.

This brings me to the potential for exchanging information with other researchers. I have already found another OPSer whose place experiences similar migration patterns to those in my own. Maybe one of your migrants moved to a place studied by another member. This is a great opportunity for sharing information.

When you have done some research on migration in your place how will you present what you have found? What are the best methods of depicting migration paths or trends? Could you make a presentation, or mount a display, at our conference on 21 November 2015? Even if you cannot attend in person you can send display material.

There are many questions in this blog but few answers. For some answers and probably yet more questions, join in or watch our April hangout-on-air, which will be at 8.00pm BST on Friday 24 April. We hope that members will be sharing their progress and stumbling blocks so far. We will also be talking about different ways of illustrating our findings.

Janet Few