CORNISH GLOBAL MIGRATION PROGRAMME

THE DIASPORA OF THE PEOPLE OF CORNWALL

Age at Migration

It is not surprising to find that the average age of those Cornish who migrated was around 20 years of age. However, the age range is considerable. It will be seen in the line chart below that there was a ‘spike’ of those under 2 years of age. One of the motivation factors for migration was the desperate need to provide for large families by seeking better opportunities, perhaps aided by the availability of ‘assisted passages. Our records do include as a migrant those children who were born at sea whilst the parents were voyaging to their destination (we have so far recorded 63 such children). It was not just young people who migrated, the eldest in our records was 83 years of age. 

Our database can only provide the age at migration when we are aware of both the year of birth and the year of migration. So far (at 3rd May 2020) we have records 23468 with these details completed. We would expect that the majority of migrants were males, therefore it is not surprising to find that 15221 were males and 8043 females. There are 204 whose gender we do not know! (a few sources, including some ships manifests, only record initials, particularly for children).