RESEARCHING THE HISTORY OF A ROAD
Let me whet your appetite by sharing stories of my South Manchester road. Constructed in 1904 on former market garden land, there are 16 houses. One resident encountered famous suffragette, Muriel Matters, accosting Winston S Churchill (whatever happened to him?) at a 1908 Manchester by-election nomination meeting. Attempting to avoid bigamy, a barrister placed newspaper advertisements seeking the whereabouts of his prospective bride’s husband. Over the road, a woman was deserted by her husband who had committed bigamy! In 1915, two neighbours sailing to battle in the Royal Edward were targeted by a German torpedo in the Aegean Sea. One lad recounted ‘thrilling tales of survival’ to the local newspaper; the other, just 17, is named on our war memorial. Recently, a neighbour mentioned an unexploded WW2 bomb and that Dominic Monaghan, star of Lord of the Rings and Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, shared a rented house when this was bedsit land. These two stories are uncorroborated but I’m working on them…
IF YOU LOVE THE STORIES, YOU HAVE THE SKILLS
I can’t promise film stars but I can promise jaw dropping moments when you discover, like I did, that the aforementioned suffragette later chained herself to the Ladies’ Gallery railing in the House of Commons and was thus the first woman to speak in parliament!
If you, like me, love stories behind a family tree, you
