Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society

04/03/2026

04/03/2026

Welcome to the Home Page for the OnLine Parish Clerks project for the County of Lancashire. This site aims to extract and preserve the records from the various parishes and to provide online access to that data, FREE of charge, along with other data of value to family and local historians conducting research in the County of Lancashire. An OnLine Parish Clerk should not be confused with Parish Clerks, who work for parish or town councils.

https://www.lan-opc.org.uk/

03/03/2026

We are now in ! Why not explore our Women's Histories Finding Aid, which puts all of our lessons, videos, workshops, and other educational resources related to women's histories in one place?

It gets updated regularly as we publish new resources and is available in both PDF and HTML form.

Find it here: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/womens-histories/

03/03/2026

In a couple of days Cyndi's List turns 30 years old. And to my surprise my friends and colleagues have been scheming to write about CL and the anniversary and post them in the Genealogy Squad. I was so pleased and maybe I cried a bit too. I'm so grateful for everyone who has been supportive of my work all these years. So, I will share those posts here.

From Cari Taplin:

"This is the start of a series that a few of us have put together to celebrate 30 (THIRTY!!) years of Cyndi’s List. We are calling it .

If you are a member of this page, you probably know Cyndi Ingle as one of the admins for this group. She is the brains behind the website "Cyndi’s List” that started back in 1996. She had been collecting links to genealogically-relevant websites, message boards, and the like, and made a list, on paper, that eventually became Cyndi’s List, on the web. Genealogists have benefited from her FREE service to catalog and organize the genealogical community ever since. Today, Cyndi’s List has over 310,000 links in 232 categories!

If you haven’t visited her site yet, go do it! And stay tuned for some fun stories and tidbits throughout the month.
Congratulations, Cyndi, on 30 years! Amazing!

https://www.cyndislist.com"

03/03/2026

This year will be our busiest year ever for running free heritage bus services from Bee Network Shudehill Interchange - we'll run buses on 25 days this year, every 30 minutes. It's a great way to get to our museum without using the car, and it's a ride back in time. And it's completely free.

03/03/2026

02/03/2026

STRETFORD is a town within the Metropolitan Borough of Trafford, 3.8 miles SW of Manchester City centre.
Historically in Lancashire, during much of the 19th century Stretford was an agricultural village known locally as Porkhampton, a reference to the large number of pigs produced for the nearby Manchester market. It was also an extensive market gardening area.
The arrival of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894, and the subsequent development of the Trafford Park industrial estate in the north of the town – the first planned industrial estate in the world– had a substantial effect on Stretford's growth. By 1901 the population had increased by 40% as people were drawn to the town by the promise of work in the new industries at Trafford Park.

During the Second World War Trafford Park was largely turned over to the production of materiel, including the Avro Manchester heavy bomber, and the Rolls-Royce Merlin engines used to power both the Spitfire and the Lancaster. This resulted in Stretford being the target for heavy bombing, particularly during the Manchester Blitz of 1940. Many buildings were damaged or destroyed during the war were Manchester United's Old Trafford football ground, All Saints' Church, St Hilda's Church, and the children's library in King Street. A memorial to those residents who lost their lives in the bombing was erected in Stretford Cemetery in 1948.

Amongst Stretford's famous residents were suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, the artist L.S. Lowry, and Manchester's first multi-millionaire John Rylands and his wife Enriqueta Augustina Rylands who lived at Longford Hall in Stretford during the later parts of their lives.
Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer KCMG (1860–1929) a British-Australian biologist and anthropologist was born in Stretford, as were ABC's lead singer Martin Fry, rock climber Derek Hersey and television actor John Comer, best known for his role in the BBC sitcom Last of the Summer Wine.
A number of Manchester United players, including some of those who died in the Munich air disaster of February 1958, lived in lodgings at 19 Gorse Avenue. A blue plaque was unveiled at the house by former lodger and Munich survivor Sir Bobby Charlton in recognition of the house's association with Manchester United.

02/03/2026

I was twenty the first time they shaved my head — not for lice, not for illness, but for defiance. I had looked a German soldier in the eye and refused to bow. Three days later, in a freezing courtyard in occupied France, they forced me to my knees. Rusted scissors scraped my scalp while my light brown hair fell into the mud. My name is Maéis Corvignon, and I am an old woman now. For decades I carried the truth quietly: in some camps, a shaved head was not only humiliation. It was a signal. A warning. A mark that you had been labeled rebel.

I was arrested in March 1943 near Reims for small acts of resistance — hiding supplies, passing messages, helping Jewish families conceal forged papers beneath loose planks in our barn. Nothing dramatic. Just enough to remind myself I was still human. Someone betrayed me. At dawn they took me away in a covered truck that smelled of fear. When the canvas lifted, I saw barbed wire and watchtowers — the outline of a world where names became numbers and silence became survival.

The days blurred into cold roll calls and bitter coffee made from roots. Some women were summoned at night. They returned with hollow eyes. Some did not return at all. I noticed what they had in common. Shaved heads. On my twenty-third day, a guard shouted my name. My stomach tightened, but something inside me did not break. They could take my hair. They could write rebel beside my name. They could try to carve shame into my skin. But they could not make me bow.

I survived the war. I grew my hair back. I built a life. Yet even now, when winter wind touches my scalp, I remember the sound of those scissors — and the quiet promise I made to myself in that courtyard: that if I lived, I would tell the truth. Because dignity does not live in hair, or in fear, or in what they call you. It lives in the moment you choose not to lower your eyes.

02/03/2026

Do you have Irish ancestors? Finding their wills can help you trace your family tree and make up for the gaps in Irish family history records. Here's everything you need to know about Ireland's wills 🇮🇪

https://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/tutorials/overseas/irish-wills

02/03/2026

Hidden History
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When Grief Sat for a Portrait: The Tender Reality of Victorian Memento Mori Photography.
In the 19th century, death was a constant and cruel visitor—especially for children. Epidemics of diphtheria, scarlet fever, and tuberculosis swept through towns with devastating speed. Infant and child mortality rates were heartbreakingly high, and many families endured sudden loss with little warning and no effective medical care.
At the same time, photography was emerging as a rare and costly innovation. For many grieving parents, the death of a child marked the first—and only—time they would ever commission a photograph.
From this sorrowful reality arose **memento mori photography**, a term derived from Latin meaning “remember you must die.” To modern eyes, these images may seem unsettling. To Victorian families, they were acts of love.
Children were carefully arranged to appear at peace—resting in cribs, laid upon lace pillows, or cradled gently in a mother’s arms. Older children were sometimes posed upright, their eyes closed or, in some cases, delicately painted open on the final print to create the illusion of life. The intention was not to emphasize death, but to preserve identity—to capture the softness of a face, the curl of hair, the presence of a child who would otherwise fade from memory.
In some portraits, entire families posed beside the deceased, creating hauntingly intimate images where the boundary between life and death was subtle. These were not spectacles of morbidity. They were keepsakes—tangible proof that a beloved child had lived, had been cherished, and would not be erased by time.
In an era before digital photographs and constant documentation, a single image carried immense weight. It became a sacred object, placed in albums, displayed in lockets, or framed in parlors as part of the mourning ritual.
Today, memento mori photographs stand as poignant historical artifacts. They remind us not only of the fragility of life in the past, but of something timeless: the depth of parental love and the universal ache of loss. Across centuries, grief may change its customs—but the desire to remember remains the same.

01/03/2026

🎙️ New Bletchley Park Podcast - E188 - Focus On: Emily Anderson

This is the first of the new sub-series Focus On: and looks at Emily Anderson. Tom interviews Jackie Uí Chionna about Britain’s greatest female codebreaker.

Even amongst the distinguished ranks of WW2 codebreakers, Emily Anderson stood out. Recruited into military intelligence during WWI, her stellar career in diplomatic codebreaking lasted into the 1950s. Her greatest achievement came with the breaking of high-level Italian ciphers during the East African Campaign of 1940-41. It was called 'the perfect example of the cryptographers' war' and earned her the OBE in 1943.

Anderson was also a renowned musicologist - her translations of the letters of Mozart and Beethoven are still considered authoritative. Yet until recent years, her life and intelligence work remained under the radar.

This episode helps to set the record straight, and kick off a new occasional series focusing on key personalities in codebreaking and intelligence. Bletchley Park's Research Officer Dr Thomas Cheetham is joined by Jackie Uí Chionna from the University of Galway to discuss the subject of her 2023 biography Queen of Codes: The Secret Life of Emily Anderson, Britain's Greatest Female Codebreaker.

Our thanks go to Sarah Langston for voicing our historical documents.

Image: Dr. Dagmar von Bushe-Weise

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms. Listen here: https://audioboom.com/posts/8867016-e188-focus-on-emily-anderson