Getting Started With Your Research

The Moving Here site, and the items and stories it provides access to can be used for a range of activities. There is something for everyone in this amazing resource:

• You can use it to learn more about the history of migration for the Caribbean, Irish, Jewish and South Asian communities.
• You can find out how to trace your family roots.
• You can record your own personal experiences by sending us your Story, which you can link to the Moving Here resources and your own records and photographs.
• You can browse through the images in The Gallery and send an e-postcard of your favourite one.
• You can keep up to date with events and news items relevant to the communities on Moving Here and migration in general.

Family Historians

can search for named individuals from a range of sources and can gather contextual information in order to carry their research forward. There are many resources in which named individuals may occur in the catalogue - such as passenger lists, internees indexes, reproductive loans and the Jews Free School registers.

Local Historians

can find information on items relating to particular villages, towns, counties in England and the countries from which people emigrated. For information on the built environment there are photographs of buildings, maps and architectural plans.

Students

and academic researchers can use the Moving Here catalogue to find out about heritage items relating to people, places or subjects they are researching. The examples of further reading in the Migration Histories section may be a stimulus to further research.

Teachers

and school students can make use of it to find details of original sources to support their teaching and learning. They can download any of the images in the Moving Here catalogue for educational use. Teachers will find the Tips for Teachers useful on how to use Moving Here to support National Curriculum subjects.

Our Partners

Anyone can find out more about the partners who have provided the digitised items and hold the originals. These organisations are local, regional and national museums, archives and libraries dedicated to the preservation of, and access to their collections. In some cases the partner's contribution to Moving Here is just a taster and there is lots more complementary material waiting to be discovered BY YOU! Contact details, opening hours, access restrictions, summaries of partner holdings and links to their home pages are provided in the Partners section of this site.

The Exhibitions and Galleries

Migration Histories, Tracing Your Roots, The Gallery, The Moving Here Catalogue and Stories on this site provide a wealth of information. You do not have to look at these in a set order. It depends on your interests and the way you prefer to search the site. Browse at your leisure, navigate around the exhibitions, explore 200 years of migration history one minute, read a touching personal story or delve into the archives the next.

Migration Histories

Anyone wanting to learn about the migration stories of the Irish, Caribbean, South Asian and Jewish communities will find plenty to interest them in Migration Histories, which tells the story of migration to England since 1800. This section explores the conditions in countries of origin, the reasons that people migrated, the journeys people made to get to England, their arrival and also the settling and building of communities. It is illustrated with items from the Moving Here catalogue.

Tracing Your Roots

Here you can find out how best to use the Moving Here catalogue and archives around the world to find out about your family history. The general introduction provides information that would be useful for any first time family historians and there is further detailed advice for tracing Caribbean, Irish, Jewish and South Asian family history. Many suggestions are made here on what sources to look at, with drawbacks explained and tips to help unravel their content. Whether you are a first time family historian or someone already involved in family history you're guaranteed to find something of use in the Tracing Your Roots Gallery.

The Gallery

Discover a selection of some of the fascinating visual items from the Moving Here catalogue in this section. Food, romance, style, war and sport are just some of the topics included here. A large range of images are here for you to browse through, download and print. If you find an image you like you can also send it as an e-postcard to family and friends. The Gallery

Moving Here Catalogue

The Moving Here catalogue holds over 150,000 items relating to the presence in England of Caribbean, Irish, Jewish and South Asian people for 200 years. The catalogue includes passenger lists, posters, newspapers, pictures of objects, military records as well as photographs, interviews and sound clips. Find out more about how to use the catalogue.

Stories

Learn about the personal experiences of others! Read the Stories contributed by our other visitors. Moving Here also invites our visitors to contribute a story of their own experiences of moving and settling in England by simply filling in the online form. For the contributor it is a great way to share and compare their experiences with others. You have a chance to express the reality, telling it like it was/is for you and your family. For the reader it provides a fantastic insight into migration, presenting different sides of the story. Your contribution can be a poem, a fictional story, an image of your artwork, photographs from the family album or just a paragraph of biographical detail which tells your story. You can contribute a story about an item that you have seen on Moving Here adding your own comments about it, or you can select a photograph or image of your own to accompany your story.

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