I'm doing my family tree at the moment and I need to research a branch of the family that spent some time in Middlesbrough in the mid-early 1870s.
Can anyone help?
Me probably. I do family history myself and grew up in Middlesbrough.
What you have to take into account is that there was no Middlesbrough as late as 1830. There were a couple of rural parishes, a few hamlets and a number of farms, so everyone in 19th century Middlesbrough is a migrant from somewhere else.
From about 1800 there was a definite migration from the rural areas of Teesdale, Swaledale and Wensleydale down the Tees valley, first to Darlington and Stockton (the railways were a draw) and then futher on to what became Middlesbrough. The town also drew people from rural NE Yorkshire and SE Durham as well.
The oldest part of the town is the area known as "Over the Border", which lies in the area between the railway station and the Tees. This is where industrial and commercial Middlesbrough began.
Middlesbrough was found to be perfect for a number of early industries.
The presence of large quantities of ironstone in the Cleveland Hills made it a natural early centre for mass steel-making (I believe Sir Henry Bessemer perfected his converter in the area). In fact, for several decades the Cleveland ironstones were the most lucrative source of iron ore in the world.
Cleveland also produced alum (for the dye industry) and potash and phosphate for the chemical industries which developed along the north bank of the Tees at Billingham and Haverton Hill (think ICI) and produced fertilisers and explosives.
The configuration of the bends in the Tees made it possible to build bigger ships on the Tees than on the Tyne or Wear, so the steel produced locally was used for ship-building and for other huge engineering projects - Dorman Long, for instance, built the Sydney Harbour Bridge, shipped it to Australia in sections and bolted it all together down under.
You don't say where your relatives came from. I know from my own family history that iron and steel workers from South Wales migrated to Teesside just before the 1871 census, and merchant seamen ended up there from SW Wales. Basically, your family would have migrated to the area because of the industries being set up, and they may have stayed or later moved somewhere else.
