Great–grandfather of our parishioner Catherine Wallwork (nee Ives), John Edward Whittaker was one of over a million men from Britain and Ireland who enlisted for military service between May 1916 and April 1917. At the age of 31, married with a young family and parishioner of St James the Less, John Edward joined the East [...]
In September 1999, after many years of searching by family members and before First World War military records became accessible via the internet, our parishioners Kathleen Testa and her son and daughter-in-law, Michael and Jackie, travelled to Gorre, a small village in the Pas de Calais region of France. There, in a cemetery first established [...]
Thomas and Bridget Halstead were parents to six children, all born between 1888 and 1899 as the family moved around different towns across east Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Bridget was an Irish immigrant from Dublin and Thomas, born in Haslingden, to where his family had moved some years earlier from a remote [...]
John Robert Larner was born on 31st January 1890, the second child of Robert and Francis Larner. He was baptised soon after birth, at St James the Less church, on 20th February. The family lived at Oakenhead Wood which, at that time, would have been a relatively short walking distance from the church, down the [...]
Samuel Evans was born in Burnley in 1891 to William and Isabella Evans, both of whom had moved to the town from Cheshire and Cumberland respectively, to work in the cotton industry. The 1891 census shows Isabella’s wider family were in Burnley as well and it was at some point prior to the turn of [...]
Joseph Edward Ashworth was born in Rawtenstall on 18th March 1895, the second child of Edward and Susannah Ashworth. It seems that Susannah died at, or shortly after, Joseph’s birth and some two years later Edward re-married, to Mary, an Irish catholic from County Mayo, whose influence may have led to both Joseph and his [...]
On 5th September 1897, within four weeks of his birth, James Nerney was baptised into St James the Less church by the parish priest, Fr Peter Klein. Just six months later, on 6th March 1898, Fr Klein baptised Thomas Regan, two weeks after his birth. It is almost certain that the two families knew each [...]
William Manning was born on 13th January 1896, one of seventeen children to Michael and Annie, both of whom had settled in the town from Ireland some twenty years earlier. They, like many from Ireland in the post-famine years, came and found work in what were busy, labour intensive, local industries. At the time of [...]
In the 25th August 1917 edition of the Rossendale Free Press, John and Mary Lord, of 41, York Street, Crawshawbooth, wrote a short poem to the second of their six sons to be killed in action in France, along with a prayer to God, for them both to rest in peace: ‘He sleeps beside his [...]
At 19 years of age, William Cowell is one of the youngest of the 25 parishioners killed in the war. His military service lasted for little more than 8 months and like many young men, he was killed in his first encounter with the enemy on the Western Front battlefields. William Cowell, born on 8th [...]
