When a history group started compiling stories of folk who left the Dales, for an exhibition, it soon became clear a book was an inevitable byproduct. Sharon Griffiths reports.

WHEN Samuel and Elizabeth Laidman left West Witton, Wensleydale, in 1830 in search of a better life, they took with them their nine children, aged from 17 years to 14 months, all their worldly possessions, and a rose bush.

They sailed to New York in a comparably swift 45 days, and then moved to Canada, where a tenth child was born.

With a lot of hard work and determination – such as clearing a 163-acre wilderness – the family and all ten children flourished. And so did the rose bush. Family legend has it that the Wensleydale rose blossomed around the Canadian doorway for more than 100 years.

All families have their stories.

And together those stories make history.

The Laidmans were not unique. Thousands of families left the Dales in search of a better life. In 1821, about 15,000 people lived in the Dales. But lead mining dwindled and farming went through bad times.

“Holding cattle is very low indeed and can scarcely be turned into money. Cheese is only badly sold – 50s to 57s per cwt. We can only grow corn every other year,” John Humphrey, of Low Thoresby, wrote to his brother-in-law in the US.

No wonder people left. By 1911, there were only 8,500 left in the Dales. One letter speaks of 200 people leaving from Arkengarthdale alone.

But although the missing thousands may have been scattered far and wide, many of them still kept in touch with family and friends at home. And now their stories and letters are the basis of Those Who Left the Dales, a remarkable and often poignant book and exhibition.

They are the work of the Upper Dales Family History Group, as a celebration of its tenth anniversary.

“There’s a lot of work done to preserve the buildings and the landscapes of the Dales,”

said Glenys Marriott, one of the group’s founders. “But there is very little that tells us about the people who created those buildings and landscapes.

This is the first ever archive of Dales migration.

“What we sometimes forget is that, while it was generally men who made the decisions and planned these journeys, it was women who coped.

Many of them had eight, nine, ten children and they packed up and went to the other side of the country or even the other side of the world, faced incredible hardships and just coped. They worked so hard.”

Sometimes, not all the family left.

“One family took some of their children, but left behind their 12-year-old daughter as company for her aunt. They never saw her again. Her father wrote her a moving letter on her wedding day to a man they never met.”

Family history is a burgeoning hobby and one that, thanks to the internet, has changed utterly in the past ten years.

Marion Moverley, a historian, lecturer and researcher, who gives regular workshops and classes for would-be genealogists, said: “Family history is a jigsaw puzzle of a bit of information from here and there and putting things together.

And also knowing where to find things.

“The internet can only do so much.”

Mrs Marriott added: “When we had our inaugural meeting, 60 turned up, which was great. But now we have an email group, with hundreds of members all over the world.

“We have members in the US, Australia, Amsterdam, Paris, as well as all over the UK, all with a strong sense of still belonging to the Dales.”

Many of those have contributed letters, photographs, quilts and stories to the exhibition, which has been a year in the planning and “five months’ hard slog” by all the members and the book’s 104 authors.

Mrs Marriott said it was soon clear that the stories supplied for the exhibition were too precious merely to be returned to their owners and forgotten.

“We decided to publish a summary of each story in a book,” she added.

Just as importantly, after all the years, the struggles and thousands of miles, those people who left the Dales are finally coming home again.