This is the story of the Chester family in South Shropshire, among those ‘quietest places under the sun’. The Clun valley runs eastward from the Welsh border until it opens out into the broader country of the rivers Onny and Teme. Here is the main north-south route in the region. The road leads south to Ludlow and Hereford, north to Shrewsbury. That was the route followed by the Chesters. From their roots in Clun, they drifted east until they were on that link to the wider world. When the railway came they were spread across the country, their roots almost forgotten.

The story covers six generations, starting in the early 18th century around the market town of Clun. The first three generations of the family were landless agricultural labourers or farmers in a small way. The personal traces they left were little more than entries of their births, marriages and deaths in Parish registers. They were too poor to leave wills or buy property, and they were not often in trouble. Their lives can be inferred mainly through the local history of the area.

Not until the middle of the 19th century can personal biographies be constructed. This was a time of change, even in the quiet Clun valley. From the mid-19C, agricultural wages fell, and later, the Great Agricultural Depression fueled the drift from the land. The Chesters moved east, arriving at Craven Arms where they took to blacksmithing. The railways brought coal and they became coal merchants. In the early days, they made money, and with money came better education for the children. The story ends in Wettleton, not far from the fine fortified manor house of Stokesay Castle. From here the Chester children moved up the social scale and became railway employees, clerks to solicitors and estate agents, leaving forever their agricultural roots, spreading out over the borders and the West Midlands.

This kind of story must be familiar to most family historians. Working backwards, ancestors lose focus and disappear into the unsatisfactory vagueness of 18th century parish registers. The most diligent efforts fail to find any personal traces from so long ago.

What I have tried to do is to fill the gaps from local studies of the area in which those remote ancestors lived. I have put the family story in the context of the decline in agriculture and the opportunities offered by industrialization in the 19th century. I hope other family historians will be encouraged to do the same. In this way we contribute to a wider understanding of the changes that took place in English society over the last 300 years.

This story follows my personal ancestry. It cannot claim to be a complete history of all the Chesters in the area. However, it does include many collateral branches, and it picks up a lot of interesting Partridges, Bytheways and other local families along the way.