Thank you — that's fair, and I'll leave the dating to someone better qualified. You may well be right about the fifties. I have confirmed that the frame was added much later by a family member, with a plywood backing and no marks of any kind on the back. The question of where the portrait was made is now one for a conservator, who may be able to date the paper and the process.

The second part of your reply is interesting. The names you list — Mountjoy, Kear, Brain, Virgo, Gwilliam — are new to me as a group, and they change how I have been thinking about the emigration. I had been treating my family as individuals who happened to leave; a documented current of Forest families into Allegheny County for the mines and the iron is a different thing altogether.

Mountjoy particularly. My uncle, who compiled a family history in 1980, quoted Timothy Mountjoy on the hard times in the Forest — the passage about a great depression having visited them, the poor in a state of starvation, and many having left for other colonies. It had not occurred to me that Mountjoys were among those who went to the same corner of Pennsylvania my family did.

Is there a published account of that migration, or is it local knowledge? I would be very glad of a reference if one exists.

For what it is worth from this end: Samuel Horobin sailed from Bristol on the SS Devon, arriving New York on 12 April 1881, in a list carrying several other English colliers and a miner. His daughter Edith and her husband James Aston followed from Liverpool on the SS Wyoming in October 1882. Both ended up at Beadling, in Allegheny County.