Thomas Wallbridge and Hannah Fancy lived out their whole lives in rural Dorset in the UK. Their son, Luke Wallbridge eventually emigrated to Australia. Luke is the next step in this family biography.
To me, this couple is representative of a huge change that mainly affected the working class in Europe. Up until this generation, the working class were largely an uneducated but stable presence in rural areas. Families would live out generations living in a single village or parish. They would live in simple houses rented from the local manor and in return provided the workforce needed to grow and process agricultural products. They would supplement their meagre wages by foraging the laneways and commons and growing their own vegetables. With the industrial revolution, the basis for this simple rural economy changed forever. Mechanisation replaced much of the rural work and farm labourers were in oversupply. Many families had a tough choice between leaving the village that had been their family home for generations, or starve.
Thomas and Hannah had a small family, but neither of their two sons stayed in their home village. Both emigrated.
Thomas and Hanna's story is now contained in Chapter 1: Family Roots.
The following resources are references in the story. Only primary sources are shown here, not indexes etc.