From Fields to Railways
The Jenkins Family and the Making of Working-Class Britain
A family history used to trace the movement from rural labour to industrial Britain.
The book follows the Jenkins family from rural communities into Crewe’s railway world and the steel community of Shotton, examining work, migration, respectability, family ambition and the changing identities of working-class Britain.
Why I wrote this book
At its heart, this book is an act of remembrance. The Jenkins family story offered a way to follow a much larger historical transition: families leaving agricultural communities, entering railway towns and industrial workplaces, and adapting their identities to forms of work that transformed Britain.
I did not want the family tree to be the end of the story. The movement from fields to railways is historically significant because it places individual decisions, marriages and occupations within the growth of industrial society. Crewe and Shotton become more than locations on a genealogy; they are communities built around work, skill, discipline and collective identity.
Where the research began
The book grew from long-running family-history research into the Jenkins line and the lives of Alfred Jenkins and Alice Elizabeth Barnett. Reconstructing earlier generations made it possible to see the scale of change within only a few generations: from rural backgrounds to railway employment, urban life and industrial mobility.
Sources and method
The research draws on census returns, civil registration, newspapers, occupational records, directories, family evidence and local context. Genealogy provides the chronology, but the book uses occupational and social history to explain what those changes meant.
How it fits into my wider work
From Fields to Railways sits between family history and working-class social history. It also provided part of the foundation for Off the Rails, where the focus narrows from the family across generations to the working life of one railwayman.
Publication details
- Author: Antony David Davies
- Published: August 2025
- Formats: Kindle and paperback