Tracing Ancestral Migration: A Personal Journey

Migration is such an emotive and contentious topic these days, but for millennia people have moved in search of work, or better opportunities for their families, and to evade persecution. Over the last 500 years, my family did the same: moving to find work in the industrial north of England after the enclosure of agricultural land in the 1800s and in the 1900s emigrating to South Africa and Australia. Some of my parents greatest friends took advantage of the government assisted passage to Australia in 1967, and we very nearly joined them a few years later.

Religion also drove migration of the Spurretts from Yorkshire in the 1500s, and eventually into Worcestershire and north Oxfordshire in the 1600s. Like many Yorkshire families, some held onto their Catholic beliefs and were persecuted for it. A very young Frances Spurrett, was placed in a English Franciscan Convent in Brussels but died from a fever aged just 23.

At several points in the distance past, the odd-sounding SPURRETT surname got recorded incorrectly, usual to something more recognisable such as SPIRIT or SPURRIER, or sometimes just as the result of a phonetic interpretation of an illiterate ancestor, e.g. SPERRITT.

I have tried to capture to movement flow of the Spurretts across places and time in a single page, as a guide to see how all the different parts fit together. The row across the bottom of the page shows the location of families that descend from the original Spurretts from Yorkshire. Following the line up the page (backwards in time) shows the route by which they arrived at their current location.

It has not been easy to fit it onto a page, without taking certain liberties. This diagram shows the major moves of significant groups rather than each individual, and also is deliberately coarse in the timescale to make the diagram readable. The numbers in square brackets are my reference system to different ‘families/clans/tribes’ for which I have far more detailed charts and research data.

I hope the diagram above is readable on the device you are using, but if its a phone, that is unlikely. In which case, here is a link to download the original. Comments, corrections and suggestions welcome.

PS This is all part of my 2025 New Year resolution to get more of my findings and discoveries into the public domain. (And I am hoping I don’t return to delete this comment towards the end of the year!) Happy new year everybody!