Life
My family were ‘farmers’ in Paraguay. Who knew?
When I was researching my family tree I came across an ill-fated resettlement scheme and it rather startled me...
December 11, 2025 16:53
When I was researching my family tree I came across an ill-fated resettlement scheme and it rather startled me...
December 11, 2025 16:53Every Jewish family has a tale to tell of emigration: usually forced out of their country by pogroms, poverty and, of course, the Holocaust. Or perhaps making aliyah or simply relocating elsewhere for a better life.
My family are no exception with ancestors from Austria (though their home town is now in Ukraine), Russia and Poland. No surprises there, I thought, until I read on an ancestry site about the “Lincolnshire Farmers”.
This was a scheme that turned out to be a scam in which what seemed like an exciting new project was advertised in Britain in 1871 asking for volunteers to move to Paraguay in order to rebuild the country after a destructive civil war. Their passage would be paid for thanks to a loan agreement between corrupt politicians and equally corrupt bankers in which everyone profited… except those who went to South America.
Around 900 signed up – only five could claim to be farmers, just 69 were actually from Lincolnshire (67 per cent were from London) and almost all were living in squalid and cramped conditions in inner cities and, in desperation, saw the it as a chance to escape. An estimated 25 per cent of the travellers were on their second migration, having arrived in Britain from Ireland, Russia, Germany and other parts of Europe, many were Jewish and in among them were the Rosen family – dad Jonas, mum Martha and daughters Alice and two-year-old Rachel – my great grandmother.
I knew of Rachel – her grave is in a Jewish cemetery in Enfield and she shares her first name with my eldest child. But I had absolutely no idea she’d been whisked off to Paraguay as a toddler on what turned out to be a disastrous adventure.
Once they got to Paraguay, in 1872, the 900 were sent off, in cattle carts, mainly to the town of Itapé where they found the conditions as squalid as those they left behind with little food, little work and if cholera didn’t get them, then bandits would. An official sent out to check on their progress remarked that there were as many graves as there were tents.
It created a scandal and though the banks and politicians escaped unscathed, it sparked a rescue mission to get the “colonists” back to Buenos Aires and then on ships back home.
Martha Rosen was pregnant when she left England. Her son John was born in Paraguay but died in Buenos Aires of disease before they boarded the boat returning to Blighty.
Much of this I would never have found out if it wasn’t for Mary Godward, a Buenos Aires-based cultural relations specialist, former country director for the British Council in Argentina and descendant of a Lincolnshire Farmer colonist.
Her fascinating and detailed account of the project has been published by Canning House, the UK’s leading forum on Latin America, and is available online.
Godward’s account reports: “On sweltering hot days in December 1872 and January 1873 some 762 men, women and children from England were dumped on the marshy outskirts of the tiny village of Itapé in the Paraguayan countryside.
“Soon after another 130 were dumped near the village of Itá. In total, 892 ‘colonists’, including around 360 children, were brought to Paraguay. Together, they would go down in the footnotes of history as the ill-fated ‘Lincolnshire Farmers’.”
The story of how they came to be there is a shocking indictment of how the urban poor were used as pawns by international financiers and venal politicians during the Victorian period. Housed in tents located in a “low place partially underwater when it rained”, they were also exposed to the blazing hot Paraguayan sun. Many died.
The Rosens, minus baby John, returned to England and to Whitechapel. Rachel went on to marry Nathan Solomons, a Russian émigré, and among their several children the youngest was Israel Solomons, my grandfather, better known as Izzy to his family and “Alf” to everyone else.
The Paraguay experience had never been mentioned to me before and I’m not sure my dad ever knew about it. I’ve considered taking a trip to Itapé to see if there is anything there connected to the Lincolnshire Farmers Scheme, though Foreign Office advice warns against it. But since when has that kind of thing stopped our tribe from going somewhere?
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