Do white British people know why they are in the UK?

[boltj]

Do they wonder why their ancestors didn’t move away to USA, Canada, Australia, NZ etc in colonial times or recently?

My late uncle ( youngest of five) emigrated from the Uk to Australia and did very well with a good job and plenty of money.
He tried to get others to follow him , but nobody else was interested in moving from the Uk and this was after WW2 and during a particularly bleak very cold and long winter ! It wasn’t for everyone and it’s probably a lot harder now ( the cost of air fares alone may put people off too , if you leave your family behind you have to factor in the costs of seeing them and so on )
Many people i heard about who emigrated many ended up coming back too.

They weren't convicts or religious zealots!

I traced my English family back to 15th century. They were all Oxfordshire farmers from a little village for centuries until the industrial revolution.

I imagine that being in London was a distant dream, let alone travelling on a boat to a foreign land.

I’m sure my ancestors chose the UK for the weather.

I know why my family stayed in Britain. It's because my paternal grandparents were going to emigrate to Australia as ten-pound Poms along with my dad, but they changed their minds at the port.

What a strange question. Why would I know why my ansestors didn’t emigrate. The vast majority of people didn’t.

My ancestors as far as I can reliably track, were too busy grubbing around on the cotton mill floors or trying to keep their kids alive to be thinking about leaving the wilds of yorkshire to go anywhere else.
There seem to have been some more ambitious ancestral 'Diddlins who went self employed, as a tea room owner and later explanding to a travelling yeast merchant, mostly off the back of the one who worked his way up to Overlooker in t'Mills... but it took a lot of subsistence farming/tenant farming and lowly mill work for just one to get that chance.

On the other side, more manual labour - blacksmithing/farriery on the whole and a good chunk of travelling showmen/women.

I reckon they were all just too damn busy, tied to land or business or not of the opinion that upping and leaving was an option for them, even if they thought it had merit for anyone. A long line of 'know your place' and 'not for the likes of us' types really.

As to how we got here, no idea on Mothers side but Fathers genetics show hints of neanderthal and viking (4% neanderthal which is no surprise to anyone thats met him!) - theres loads of other stuff and its only those two that are fractionally above average though, but he's quite happy about the viking bit (less so about the neanderthal!)

Are you wanting me to feel bad about my lack of knowledge on it or feel bad about how boring my ancestry is?

We descend from the huguenots, that’s all I know. We had to flee France and settled in Spitalfields.

I think its worth remembering that in the UK, we're not that many generations away from a lot of people being in no way free to just up and leave, or even free to marry who they wanted - being tied to a tenancy and a landlord they had to cough up local taxes, produce and labour to, and ask (actually, beg!) permission from to leave the area and settle elsewhere or to marry someone.

In times when people travelled far less, communicated and interacted with far fewer people, breaking free of the ideas ones parents or grandparents had and the roles one was born to fill was much harder.

I don’t feel guilty for being white, if that’s what you’re trying to do OP. Fed up of the reverse racism narrative tbh

Oh look another "white British," bashing thread
Get a life

No, it’s never occurred to me to wonder, probably because I'm absolutely not interested in my family history 😂

What an odd question. Usually the only reason people move a significant distance is because they are forced to or they believe that there are better opportunities to get ahead. This tracks for all of my ancestors who came to Australia from every country in the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Jamaica, Estonia, Norway and Finland. Some were “First Fleet” assistant to the governor, some were convicts (one returned to London and came back to Aus with his family), some were gold miners, lots of doctors, several merchants, one was a concert pianist. Some were fleeing religious persecution. Some were fleeing arranged marriages. Lots of stories, but they all fly in the face of the “All Aussies are Criminals” theory.

Maternal side mainly Scots, a wee bit Irish. Far more English than expected in my dad’s side. His mother was born in Dublin, as were her parents, they must have moved from England at some point. No movement out of UK until my generation when one cousin went to New Zealand, one to Canada.

My mum's side emigrated to England from Ireland, my dad's from Scotland. Both sides ended up in the east end of London.

Two of my mums grandparents were South African, they moved to the UK in their early twenties. One was Polish, and the other from Finland (Sami). The South Africans were in service and moved with the family they worked for when they moved to the UK. Polish granny came over with her parents, her dad was very wealthy so it was a status thing. Finnish Grandad was an engineer and in the UK on business who was sent to the UK to look at a certain type of factory (I’m not sure what). He loved pubs and getting pissed, so he traded his ticket home for beer money 🤣

Even 100 years ago most people hardly moved a few miles away in their lives.
The rest of the world would have been known about through books and maps.
We were mostly peasants!

No I don’t wonder about it.
One of my relatives was a £10 Pom, another a GI bride, but other than that they stayed.

I'm white and British.
My father came to the UK as a German/Jewish refugee in 1938, my grandfather as a Russian refugee in 1921 (via India because the family escaped via China), my grandmother's grandad was an economic migrant from County Cork. My great grandad's line was pretty pure English and traces back to the thirteenth Century.

My family came and stayed here because the UK.provided a place of safety and oppprtunity. Some of my maternal grandparents' aunts/uncles/cousins did emigrate to Australia, Canada and the USA. I think my part of the family stayed because they did very well here.

Essentially, despite the fact that I am white, blonde and live a very English/Establishment life, my family were immigrants on the whole. Their family, who didn't get here were killed (not the Irish side, they may have starved).

Why would think about this particularly? The UK is a wondefful country! There aren’t many places you can have free healthcare, free schooling, free housing if you are poor and a steady income and jobs market - in a green and verdant land.

It sounds like you have no idea how lucky you are compared to the rest of the world.

It’s a thought provoking question. I actually really like the seasons and the weather works for me. I tried living in the US and I just felt weird all the time.

My grandparents and my mum aunties and uncles did emigrate and went to Australia on a boat. They came back. Good thing really cos i wouldn’t exist if my mum hadn’t met me dad…..

Well Im White and English and proud to be so thankyou very much.

Nope, can’t say I care in the slightest. Nothing to do with me really.

We did move a lot from Ireland to Wales to England and the other side of my family moved from Scotland to England we personally were going to move to Australia but nan got sick or my parents changed their minds either way we stayed by family

I've no idea why people think that's a bad thing the land was here family worked the land why would we move