Migration in England and Wales during the nineteenth-century has been much studied in the past century. In the mid-1880s E.G. Ravenstein analysed the 1881 census reports relating to the migration of people from rural to urban environments and published his research in a paper entitled ‘the laws of migration’. This has been the basis for many migration research projects since that time. My article uses a microhistory case study of four small Lincolnshire settlements within close proximity from 1851 to 1901, and uses the census enumerators’ books, civil records of births, marriages and deaths, trade directories, and newspaper articles, to trace the migratory journeys of the males from those settlements. This research traced as many males as possible from the ‘base’ census of 1851 to subsequent censuses throughout the nineteenth century, therefore ensuring that the detail of migration when focused on very specific communities was not obscured by overarching generalised migration research countrywide. Ultimately, Lincolnshire is shown to be a county where circular migration, and relative immobility predominated, rather than step-migration of the sort traced by Ravenstein.

在过去的一个世纪中，对十九世纪英格兰和威尔士的移民进行了很多研究。在1880年代中期，拉文斯坦（EG Ravenstein）分析了1881年与人口从农村环境迁移到城市环境有关的人口普查报告，并将其研究结果发表在题为“移民法则”的论文中。自那时以来，这一直是许多迁移研究项目的基础。我的文章使用微观历史案例研究，对1851年至1901年附近的四个林肯郡小定居点进行了研究，并使用了人口普查员的书籍，出生，婚姻和死亡的民事记录，贸易目录和报纸文章，以追踪美国的迁徙历程。这些定居点的雄性。从1851年的“基础”人口普查到整个19世纪的人口普查，这项研究都尽可能多地追踪了男性，因此，要确保在全国范围内进行全面的广义移民研究时，不会将移民的细节集中在非常具体的社区上。最终，林肯郡被证明是一个以循环迁移和相对固定化为主导的县，而不是拉文斯坦所追踪的那种逐步迁移的县。