What a very unchristian , judgemental remark for a chaplain to make.
It was also a rare, but real, phenomenon albeit subject to a daily-mail-esque moral panic.
https://www.thesocialhistorian.com/fraud-murder-burial-club/But to the topic at hand I always try and link the local and social history to my genealogy. For instance some of mine moved from Buckinghamshire to Lancashire in the window 1832 -1839 and when I looked at the local history it turned out that poor law commissioners sponsored poor ag labs to relocate by canal 1835-1837 - probably not a coincidence.
That said it pays to check your assumptions as another family relocated from the countryside to the towns and I assumed they were following the work but I later found a distant relation with the same surname (they were the only family in the area with the name) was involved in a fairly nasty attempted murder and then within 15 months everyone with the name had either moved to Bradford or towards Manchester.
But for me it's always a victory to link the family tree to specific historical events. For example the Loveclough printworks burnt down and both a granddad's maternal aunt and a paternal aunt relocated their respective families 35 miles to the same village.
I've also found more than a few emigrants whose departure turned out to coincide with goldrushes.
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