This explains the widow Sarah Ann Joyce (nee Nichols), age 44, living in 1881 on an annuity on Cauldwell Street in Bedford with her three teen age children - all born to a plantation owner, in Jamaica.
Or Louise Millar 42 year old spinster from Burton keeping house in 1881 for a barrister in Kensington
Or widow Charlotte Clayson (nee Haddon), daughter of a Burton Latimer farmer, born in 1837, running her own private hospital as Nursing Matron in Finsbury Square London
And a Burton Latimer curate's son who did rather well for himself when he became a lawyer. About 1856, Henry W V Johnson moved to London and became a barrister; but even he bettered himself when he married Cecilia whose given occupation in 1881 was “daughter of peer of the realm”. At the time of the census they lived together in some style with their two children and 7 servants at 14 Curzon Street.

Nevertheless, of the 850 souls born during the nineteenth century in Burton Latimer: old or young, labourer wielding a shovel in the ironstone fields or barrister born with a silver spoon in his mouth, 669 were still enumerated in Northamptonshire at the time of the 1881 census - taken in the spring.

Of these, 285 were still located in the town of their birth and another 210 lived in the towns of Northampton (41), Wellingborough (45), and Kettering (124).

It is clear that it was the growth of industry that induced the movement away from the rural eastern counties, and the biggest migrations were to the nearest big town. The next most important “honey pots” that attracted the swarms were the contiguous counties Leicestershire and Warwickshire - but of course this meant the attraction was the demand for labour in Leicester and Birmingham and Aston, not the rural areas - there was plenty of demand for replacement of such personnel in rural Northants!
Leicester received 66% of the total migration of the 60 born in Burton and Birmingham received 73% of a smaller contingent of 19 that moved to Warwickshire.

Despite all the new opportunities, many of the adults pursued the same occupation or trade they had plied back home:
John Croxen took his wife and three children to open a greengrocery business in Leicester in 1876 ; eighteen year old Annie Eady went there to teach in a school for young ladies; poor little Herbert Blofeld - aged 13, was packed off to continue being an unemployable deaf mute in a posh little special school in Edgbaston, Birmingham; and most of the rest continued to work in newly established shoe factories in Leicester or as boot makers in the new residential areas of other big towns in the West Midlands.

Apart from London and the line of towns in North Kent between Woolwich and Gravesend, few other areas of Britain received migrants from Burton Latimer. A few iron workers moved to near Staveley in Derbyshire where there were iron forges using Burton ores; Lewis Neal of Burton moved to Sheffield as a stoker when he was 27, c1871; and also in the 1870’s William Buckley and his brother John took their young wives first to Kettering then later to Leeds but remained boot makers; James Ball, also a boot maker, took his wife and his teenage daughter Lizzie to the Crofts in Nantwich, Cheshire, where all his new neighbours worked in the shoemaking trade.

Nobody from Burton Latimer moved to Scotland, Wales or the south western extremity of England. Nobody moved further North than Hartlepool despite the London to Edinburgh rail links extending beyond Newcastle in 1848; Nobody went further northwest than Manchester. In 1871 an itinerant carpenter, Henry Wilson from Liverpool, and his young wife from Herefordshire stayed in Burton Latimer for a while and they had a son there. In 1881, Aged 9, William Wilson of Burton Latimer lived with two siblings born after him at decent intervals of 3 or 4 years in Portsea . No doubt he appears in the 1901 census as a carpenter too - but once a family has made so many moves a pattern is set and it is unlikely the boy will have been enumerated in the Hampshire area.

Finally to Kent, where the North Foreland is almost as far south by east as one can go. Only one native of Burton had reached thus far by1881: Walter Abbott, aged 12 had ended up in an orphanage in Margate. While more than 70% of those born in Burton Latimer were seeking their fortunes or meeting misfortune elsewhere, the town itself was expanding and attracting a diversity of people. Plots of land behind the Main street had filled up with small cottages. Though local limestone, sometimes decorated with chocolate coloured quoins and stripes of ironstone, continued to be used for cottage or mansion alike, soon after 1887 the need for housing for the workforce - and quickly, brought about the change to red brick from the brick earths south of the river Nene.

Houses in Church Street still show the traditional style of mixed limestone and ironstone which preceded the arrival of red brick as a building material

The first buildings made of the new building material, however, were prestigious ones reflecting the new elites and their needs: 1894 The Working Men’s Club and 1898 The new Council School. These graphically demonstrate which were the two fastest growing elements of society and what facility would best provide for their hearts and minds. These buildings mark the dividing line between the New Town and the Old. A detailed examination of the 1881 Census (shown below) shows how the social strata along the old frontages were beginning to segregate out and settle into different parts of the town.

Those born in Burton Latimer - numbering about 285 out of a total of 1,660 inhabitants in 1881 - were thus outnumbered by newcomers by nearly 5 to 1. And the younger new immigrants had, in any case, contributed their fair share of the 285 “Burton-Latimer-born” cohort. The 1881 age-sex distribution graph for the town shows all the characteristics of a newly established settlement typical of the Colonies or the American Mid-West.