生まれ育った町: how to break down?

Question

Consider the following sentence:

生まれ育った町を離れてすでに20年の年月が過ぎた。

I don’t grammatically understand the first part: 生まれ育った町. Semantically fine, just grammatically.

生まれ育った is modifying 町. I don’t see which is the correct order and how are the two words to be interpreted.

生まれる is “being born”. 生まれ comes up in jisho.org as noun too (building up on the confusion). Below is my tentative explanation.

This is a relative clause. The direct version would be:

私は町xに生まれて育った。町xを離れてすでに20年の年月が過ぎた。

In other words, as one moves from the direct to the relative clause the て drops. Sounds fine, except for the fact that I didn’t find a confirmation (yet) on the web.

Question (short version): break down 生まれ育った町.

Same question (longer version): am I right? Does moving to relative clauses make the て drop from て-conjugated verbs? If so (and sorry for being tedious) could proof of such statement be provided (either books or links)? (Yet again) If so, is also 生まれて育った町 with て NOT dropped correct?

Side note: I just finished Tae Kim’s “A guide to Japanese grammar” (except for the last “advanced” part, which doesn’t seem to contain this topic) and I’m starting with “Kanji in Context”, where I stumbled on the above sentence.

Answer 1

Short answer, 生まれ育つ is its own word, having its own dictionary entries.

From Apple built-in dictionary:

うまれそだ・つ 5【生まれ育つ】 （動タ五[四]） そこで生まれてそこで育つ。「―・った土地」

Does moving to relative clauses make the て drop from て-conjugated verbs? If so (and sorry for being tedious) could proof of such statement be provided (either books or links)? (Yet again) If so, is also 生まれて育った町 with て NOT dropped correct?

There is no such rules saying that て is dropped in relative clauses. In this case, 生まれ育つ is lexicalized, but even if it's not, there's nothing wrong grammatically with saying （自分が）生まれて育った街, as a relative clause is, after all, a "clause", and whatever (mostly) is allowed in the main clause can be moved into a relative clause.