Dear Martha,

Welcome to the forum, it's great to hear from someone with a Whaley Bridge past like you. The houses in the UK are usually made of stone or more recently brick with a stone or slate roof and they are made to last forever. I have friends in the US who are amazed at this as they are used to renewing their wooden roof tiles every couple of decades and their wooden houses every 50 years or so. There are many houses in the Whaley Bridge area over 200 years old but most of the local farmhouses are double that age and more.

Happy New Year to you and your family and to all the forum readers.

Thank you for the warm welcome, G. Jackson and Mrs. Curious. Thank you so much for looking up the baptism records, Mrs. Curious! I've been digging around Ancestry.com, but have not come across that record. And I have gathered the names of 10 of my great grandmother's children, but not Clancy Percy. However, she had 19 children, and on the 1900 census, it says only 10 children are surviving. In any case, Clancy did not make the trip to America. If he was my grandmother's twin, he must have died before then, as they immigrated in 1893. I will ask my mother to see if she remembers anything about a twin brother. In any case, thank you so much for your help, Mrs. Curious. I will take you up on your offer and contact the administrators about exchanging email addresses.

G. Jackson, our house in Honolulu is quite old at around 70 years. It's much too warm here to build stone or brick houses, although some rich enough to have central air conditioning do so. We are fortunate to have an old house with lots of windows and a big old mango tree that shades the house and keeps things cool. Termites are a big problem and the wood definitely has to be treated and replaced when the termites get ahead of the treatment! The newer houses don't have as many windows as the old ones and need air conditioning to keep cool. Another odd thing I found when I moved here is that the older houses are single wall construction, just a single tongue and groove board between me and the elements. Sorry, this board is about Whaley Bridge, not Hawaii! I am very anxious to know how old the house is at 89 Buxton though. I can see it on Google maps actually, but I'm not sure which side of the road is the 89 address. They both look quite old. On one side is a stone house with white windows, and across the road is a nice house with flowers in the window box and lace curtains. Isn't Google maps great? I can walk the streets of Whaley Bridge and take a virtual look around. It looks like a lovely town. My sister and I have decided to start saving up to bring our parents for a vacation. They are 80 and 85 years old, but Mom has to have some surgery to replace her knee joints before we can make the trip.

Oh, and Mrs. C, what is a joiner? I saw that on the old census records but I don't know what that means. The 1900 Texas census states his occupation as a carpenter. Family legend has it that he worked for his father and they had a coffin making business. I have their dining room table that was shipped over with them. It seems to get passed down to the Martha's in the family. I've often wondered if he made the table himself. We still use it, as we did when I was growing up in Texas.

Martha

Martha,

A Joiner is a superior kind of carpenter - one who is particularly skilled at joining different pieces of wood together and perhaps decorative work, sometimes for furniture making, and, of course, for coffins.

Best regards 

Edited by user 04 January 2012 19:22:37(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Hi Martha,

Welcome to the forum.

89, Buxton Road was built in 1900 on land which  belonged to the Whaley Bridge Industrial and Working Man's Friendly Society Limited.

It appears that the first owner was a Charles Edward Fenton.

The house was sold on 17th April 1905 to a Mr John Trickett.

After this I do not know how many owners there were, but I believe there were very few. It may have remained with Mr Trickett.

Some time around 1947 (I believe), it was bought by Edwin Robinson and his wife.

I bought the house in 1997 from Mr Robinsons estate, and have been  told that he lived there with his wife for perhaps 50 years.

I think the Whaley Bridge Industrial and Working Man's Friendly Society Limited became the Whaley Bridge and Buxton Cooperative Society ltd, as I have found a reference in a later indenture  which indicates in the text that the land my house was built on belonged to the Carr Brook or Wheatsheaf Estate of the Whaley Bridge and Buxton Cooperative Society ltd.vThis later indenture relates to the fotpath and footbridge which originally ran down by the side of my property and over the river Goyt on a bridge constructed around 1923.

I havn't seen any reference to the surname 'Collier' in any of the documentation I have, so i wonder if you have the right address. There is another 89, Buxton Road in Furness Vale that occasionally gets my post, so I did wonder if this could be it. However, I had a look, and it just doesn't look old enough.

My house has a red door and a garden full of weeds on Google maps !

Cheers

Jon.

I am truly overwhelmed by your kindness. You are bringing these old family stories to life and I am learning so much. Mahalo, thank you very much, especially for pointing me in the direction of the Disley.net site. Mrs. Curious, thank you for the list of all the Collier baptisms. Incidentally, Gail, Frank Albert is my mother's (Frankie Ayars Gentle) Uncle Frank, who she is named for. He died a very short time after she was born. I think he might have been the first Collier to strike off on his own to travel to Texas. Jon, I took another look at the 1851 census, since your house was built in 1900, this was well after my great grandfather was at this address. The census was taken in Fernilee. Is that in or near the Furness Vale?

G. Jackson, you burst the bubble that RockBanker created. I thought my ancestors were superior skilled craftsman and now I find just a joiner - below the skill of an actual carpenter! Oh well, he was a carpenter once he got to Texas... I didn't say it was too hot! I LOVE the weather here. It's just too hot for brick houses. Some of the really old houses have a stone foundation and lower part of the outside wall, but almost all the houses are wood because that lets the tropical breezes cool things more effectively. Sorry about your high winds. Once in a while, we get hurricanes, or tropical storms with some very high winds. But so far, our old house has weathered them all.

Hello Martha

Welcome to the Forum

Attached is a photo of Buxton Road taken circa 1910 showing the currently numbered 89, it is possible that as suggested the house numbers have altered since this was taken, as it wasn't uncommon to re-number when further houses were built, I have looked in Kellys Directory Derbyshire for 1895 and it gives - Collier, James & Charles (brothers) carpenters & builders, Horwich End, it was not unusual at that period in the UK for Carpenters / Joiners and buiders to also sideline in coffin manufacture and Funeral arrangements, many of the current Funeral Directors started their family business this way. 

John as the Co-op bakery was situated off Wheatsheaf Rd that area of land would have belonged to The Whaley Bridge & Buxton Co-operative Society.

Hope this helps.

 

Edited by user 05 January 2012 21:37:49(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Thanks Sallcross. I think you are right. My gggf is listed at that address in Fernilee in 1851, and immigrated to USA in 1893. So the numbers must have changed before Jon's house was built in 1900. I love looking at all the old pictures on this forum. And thanks to you all, I've found some very interesting old newspaper articles that list the Collier family. I have a couple of old photos of Martha and Joseph, which I will try to scan this weekend and post here. Still trying to find a marriage record, but I think I may have found one in 1835 for Joseph's parents (also Joseph and Martha) and it lists that Martha with the maiden name of Vernon. James and Charles were my ggf's brothers and I guess stayed on with the business after Joseph left WB. I think the business was started by their father who died in 1893, so looks like the brothers kept it going a while at least.

Martha

89 Buxton Road Fernilee and 89 Buxton Road Horwich End are the same place, It can seem quite complex when you reference back through the census, In the 1800s Whaley Bridge as a town stood in two Counties divided by the boundary which is The River Goyt meaning that Taxal, Errwood & Whaley were in Cheshire and Fernilee, Upper Hartington Quarter and Horwich End were in Derbyshire, to make it even more complicated on the Census Horwich End is a district of Fernilee, although today if you asked anyone local about Fernilee and Horwich End they would make a distinct difference between the two, another twist is that Fernilee is in the ecclesiastical Parish of Hope a town around Ten miles from Fernilee which nowadays makes no sense or reason but in the early days when the Parish was formed there were no other Churches locally and the parish Church in Hope was the nearest, therefore Fernilee was attached to it. I can hear the locals saying what about Taxal it's earliest building & records date back to the twelth century but Taxal is in Cheshire not Derbyshire.

Ps I have Collier and Vernon ancestors on my tree too

Edited by user 06 January 2012 12:10:09(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I have to get on the desktop to post pictures. This iPad will not let me upload to this site, perhaps the site upload requires Flash, which the iPad doesn't have. This means I have to get my husband off the computer, and I got the iPad to solve that problem in the first place! To be fair, he's a graphic and fine artist, so he uses the computer for work, not jus playing around like I do? Ok now I've really got to get to work before I get sacked as you Brits say.