The Quantitative Analysis of Family Names: Historic Migration and the Present Day Neighborhood Structure of Middlesbrough, United Kingdom

Abstract

This article describes the way in which a unique new quantitative data resource and evidence base has been used to relate historic measures of U.K. migration flows to the contemporary socioeconomic patterning of neighborhoods. The resource enables generalized analysis of the regional origins of British and Irish people from their family names, and makes it possible to relate the current regional distribution of names in the United States, Great Britain, and other English-speaking countries to equivalent information from the Great Britain Census of 1881. Illustrative applications may be viewed at http://www.spatial-literacy.org. In this article we develop a number of indices of the historic origins of English and Irish family names, as a prelude to detailed microscale analysis of late twentieth century surname patterns. We illustrate the usefulness of these various indices through case study analysis of Middlesbrough and East Cleveland, an area of the United Kingdom that attracted large numbers of economic migrants during its rapid nineteenth century industrialization. We use our quantitative evidence of the historical distributions of different family names in order to characterize the social mobility of descendants of Scottish, Irish, and Cornish migrants, and to evaluate the practice of ascribing family names to particular localities in historical GIS. The case study thus illustrates the ways in which our data resource may be used to substantiate existing thinking about historic migration and residential structure, as well as to generate and investigate new hypotheses that might guide future work.

Key Words:

• family names
• migration
• neighborhood profiling

Acknowledgments

This research was funded under Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Grant RES-000-22-0400. The authors are very grateful to Kevin Schürer of the ESRC Data Archive and to Experian for the supply of historical and contemporary data, to Alex Singleton for help with the artwork, and to the anonymous referees who helpfully and constructively commented on the first version of the manuscript.

Notes

Source: 1998 Electoral Register.

Note: G.B.=Great Britain.

Source: 2001 Census of Population.

Notes: Index values, study area average=100. Additional notes to Table 3 (see Harris, Sleight, and Webber 2005 for full details):

A Very high levels of household income, typically areas of pleasant, detached houses in the better areas of town, with an older population of professionals and senior managers, mostly with children of university age or beyond.

B Modern, owner-occupied housing, typically built in the past thirty years by large developers, at fairly high residential densities. Households in these sorts of areas are typically climbing career ladders in large organizations, are first-time or second-time mortgagees and have one or two children, typically of school or preschool age.

C Areas of interwar, semidetached houses, where older people have now paid off a large proportion of their mortgages. These are areas of higher than average incomes, but contain many middle rather than senior managers.

D Areas of older terraced housing, much of which was originally built to house a late Victorian manufacturing labor force. Located in older, inner-city areas close to sources of industrial employment, many of these neighborhoods have been taken over by Asians. However the type also occurs in older mining communities in East Cleveland.

E Areas containing a mix of well-educated, single, and transient populations, typically including students and young professionals, many of whom live in small but smart rented flats. These areas also contain large old houses, many of which are suitable for subdivision, suitable for first-generation migrants.

F Inner-city areas of social housing, many of which result from the clearance of older terraces and which often take the form of mid-rise or high-rise flats. This group has a high proportion of households with only a single person resident.

G Large estates of low-rise social housing, mostly on the periphery of large cities, which have been abandoned by the more enterprising skilled manual workers and where, as a result, few residents have exercised the right to buy. These areas typically have large proportions of single-parent families, people who are sick or unemployed, who do not have access to a car, and who are troubled by vandalism and delinquency.

H Found typically among the better and smaller council estates where former tenants have espoused more middle-class lifestyles and where people are sufficiently enamoured by the quality of their estate to have exercised their right to buy homes previously rented from the council.

I High proportions of old people reliant on state benefits. They mostly live in council accommodation.

J High proportions of old people but, by contrast with Low Income Elders, these tend to be better off, enjoying reasonable health and life expectancy as well as active leisure pursuits funded by occupational pension schemes.

K Genuinely rural in character, not just commuting countryside. Though only a minority of the workforce is now engaged in agriculture, these postcodes are the last bastions of Britain's rural way of life and places where neighbors are most likely to look out for each other.

Note: Index values, study area average=100.

1. Specifically in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

2. Current U.K. postcode (zipcode) areas were delineated by the Royal Mail in the 1970s and, with few exceptions, are centered on major transport route intersections. As such they present something akin to a tessellation of functional regions (see Champion et al. 1987, 9). Our choice of study area was motivated by the desire to investigate the effects of the industrial development of Middlesbrough and East Cleveland, and for reasons also of data acquisition excludes the adjacent constituency of Redcar.

3. No information is available for electors in Northern Ireland. The threshold of 100 occurrences is an arbitrary one adopted, in practice, for the entire Great Britain population in 1881 and for all adults eligible to vote in 1998.

4. Thanks are due to Kevin Schürer, Director of the ESRC Archive at the University of Essex.

5. More specifically the study area consists of a set of postcode sectors that are contained entirely within or fall predominantly within the two constituencies.

6. Elector registration on the Great Britain Electoral Roll is a legal requirement, although electors are allowed to opt out of their names appearing in the version of the register that is available at the individual level in the public domain.

7. A full description of the U.K. Mosaic types can be found on the Web site of Experian Business Strategies: http://www.business-strategies.co.uk/Content.asp?ArticleID=566.

8. An important factor in the growth of Middlesbrough in the 1850s was the development of the iron ore industry. This coincided with the decline of the tin and copper mines of West Cornwall with the result that many redundant Cornish miners moved to Teesside during this period—hence the high concentration of Cornish names today, notwithstanding the distance of Middlesbrough from Cornwall.

9. Names originating in Scotland are identified partly on the basis of linguistic structure (i.e. names starting with Mac– or ending in –ie). Confusions can be resolved by calculating the proportion of occurrences of the name that are currently resident in Scotland. A file containing the frequencies of different names in the Republic of Ireland enables us to compare the relative frequencies of names in Britain and the Republic of Ireland, which also assists in the allocation of names of uncertain provenance. Asian names can also be identified in part from their linguistic structure, and in part from studying their geographical distribution. Another valuable source of information for identifying names with origins outside England is the use of counts of association between the name and the first names contained against that name on the electoral roll. The reliability of the identification process is indicated by the strength of the correlation (0.957) between the degree of under- or overrepresentation of Asian names defined in this way across each of the sixty-one Mosaic geodemographic clusters and the degree of under- or overrepresentation of persons born in South Asia.

10. A number of Cornish names can be defined using linguistic analysis. Examples are names with the prefix “Tre,” “Bos,” and “Pol.” Tremayne and Tregonning are examples. However there are many other Cornish names, such as Laity, which are toponymic but that have no apparent Celtic linguistic root. See http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/familynames/papers/20_cornish_migration.pdf.

11. The indices created in this article are described in Webber (2005) and are quite different from location quotients. In general our dataset provides a more than adequate number of cases for the kinds of analysis that we have undertaken.

12. Available from the U.K. Data Archive at http://www.essex.ac.uk.