moving around the country in 1891

[bellfamily]

From my search for family members,
in 1891 at the age of 50+ my great grandad ( a master baker) left his wife and family in Plymouth to go and live with an illiterate 27 year old laundry worker in Penge ( hardly the centre of the universe).
Could anyone please shed light on how or why this may be the case,considering most people lived their whole lives within a few miles of where they were born.

[Pam Downes]

I think you may have the wrong person, but I have stuff to sort and post in your other thread before I can prove it.

Pam

[Megan Roberts]

Could anyone please shed light on how or why this may be the case,considering most people lived their whole lives within a few miles of where they were born.

That's a huge assumption which may not be correct.

People moved for work - the industrial revolution drew people from rural communities to the cities - sailors went where their ships went - workers in the Royal Naval Dockyards moved from dockyard to dockyard - there are many more examples.

My own gt gt grandmother sometime in the 1850s moved from the Welsh border near Oswestry to Tetbury in Gloucestershire - and I guess that was for work - she was probably in service. There she met and married her future husband a policeman from Tewksbury who had been a silk weaver. To cut a long story short they travelled back up the Welsh border, across to Aberystwyth and then on up to a small village just south of Caernarfon, where they remained for the rest of their lives. My gt gt grandfather even learnt to speak Welsh in the process.

[Lesley Robertson]

Yes. My multi-great grandmother was a farm worker in the NE of Scotland. In the summer, a group would get together and head down to the Border with England, where they'd sign up to bring the harvest in. When finished, they'd move north a bit, and repeat the process, arriving home in time to harvest for the farms they lived on. One year, my multi-great got halfway home and met a young man...
Reader, she married him!

[fullscott]

Yes. My multi-great grandmother was a farm worker in the NE of Scotland. In the summer, a group would get together and head down to the Border with England, where they'd sign up to bring the harvest in. When finished, they'd move north a bit, and repeat the process, arriving home in time to harvest for the farms they lived on. One year, my multi-great got halfway home and met a young man...
Reader, she married him!

I do love a Happy Ending.

Jane

[Jomot1]

most people lived their whole lives within a few miles of where they were born.

I agree with Megan, that's a huge assumption and not necessarily true. Checking the 1891 census for my own Great Grandparents, only 3 of the 8 were living anywhere near where they were born.