Hi Ana, which country did they go to?
Have you heard the song 'Always Argyll'?
"I'll soon have to think of NZ (or Australia) as home,
But the truth will be always Argyll"
But that's too recent for your ancestors.
Some of my ancestors came from Padstow, in Cornwall, but all knowledge of the Padstow May festivities were lost/forgotten within 2 generations - perhaps they never indulged anyway???
I have resurrected the music over here!
The NZ Folklore Society put lots of effort and time into finding folk music that either came over with our forebears or originated here from folk sources - indigenous folk (but not Maori - that's a whole different ball game).
We didn't do very well - mainly we came to the conclusion that most of the early settlers in places like Christchurch, Auckland and Wellington didn't really indulge in anything other than 'Parlour singing' around a piano. There are lots of old music books and loose sheets of Scottish songs or National songs in the junk shops but although I've spent hours going through them, it's still only stuff like Annie Lawrie or Bonny Dundee or The Ash Grove - all the stuff kids had to sing in school assemblies years ago.
Dunedin had more Scots in the population so bagpipes and dancing and Highland games were indulged in here.
But the main thing we found was poetry - sometimes printed in newspapers as political comment, sometimes in collections and occasionally someone would put a tune to a poem and hey presto, a 'NZ folk song'.
So we came to the conclusion that (big generalization coming up)either our ancestors didn't know the songs from their homeland, they didn't believe in that pagan stuff and had never indulged, or else they came here to forget about it.
Australia, on the other hand, had lots of people who didn't want to be there and had fond memories of home. So if you're in Oz, you'll have a better chance of finding music brought out from various places in Britain.
Robyn