Appeal to trace Blackburn family (From Lancashire Telegraph)
When news happens, text LT and your photos and videos to 80360. Or contact us by email or phone.
Appeal to trace Blackburn family
2:44pm Thursday 5th January 2012 in Looking Back
CLUE Jane Chew, with a daughter and grandchildren, in a Blackburn park, around 1900
TWO brothers in Canada have appealed to Looking Back readers to help them find their ‘lost’ Blackburn relatives.
It will be the first time in half-a-century that the two branches of the family, separated by the Atlantic, will have been in contact, if anyone comes forward with information.
John and Stephen Morrisey now live in Toronto, after their mother’s family left Blackburn more than 100 years ago, in 1910.
They are trying to find the Chew family, of Blackburn, the descendants of their great grandparents, Thomas and Jane Gardner Chew, who lived here, in the late 1800s, in Croyden Street and Burlington Street.
It is known that the family was affiliated with the Particular Baptists Church, which then had a tabernacle in Blackburn.
The couple had two sons and five daughters, including Bertha, who was John and Stephen’s grandmother, and there were also Alice, Ruth and Sarah Jane.
Obadiah was one of the sons.
Alice married Bill Holden and one of their daughters was Gertrude, known as Gertie, who married Fred Brown, in Blackburn, in 1919.
The couple emigrated to Canada after the First World War, but continued to visit their friends and relatives in Blackburn until the 1960s.
Indeed, the entire Holden family moved to Ontario after the war, apart from a son, Richard, who died in Blackburn in 1947.
Obadiah Chew married Annie Brooks and had one son, Thomas, born in 1902.
The family lived in Hawkshead Road, Blackburn, but Obadiah died in 1914, at the age of 35.
Ruth Chew married Harry Walton in 1906 and lived in Blackburn. Harry’s father, Nathaniel, ran the Crown Inn, in Bolton Street.
The couple had two daughters. Susannah, born in Commercial Street, in 1907, and Isabella born in 1913.
If you have information to help John and Stephen trace their family, you can contact them at Suite 1500, 438 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M5G 2K8Canada, or email them at jrmorrissey@smart-biggar.ca
