Swain Fold

As a child, living in Blackburn, just after the war, I had three old Aunties who I went to for lunch each day. One day they told me of ancestors in Great Harwood who farmed and owned and leased land and property. It seems some later descendant had gambled any inheritance from it away. Some years later, having left the army, I worked for a while in Great Harwood, in a workshop just a few doors up from the Wellington Inn, not realising at that time that my whole paternal family history lay right behind the building I was working in.

In later life I took up genealogy, in the days when it was quite laborious, not much on the Internet but there was of course Familysearch, the 1881 census and a good index of 1851. Suddenly I came across a David Swain living in Oswaldtwistle but born in Great Harwood. That is when the words of my Aunts came to me. I found the old Swain Family in Butts and Stopes in the 1851 and 1841 census.

(Trevor now found www.great-harwood.org.uk and found lots of useful information in the genealogy section of the site.)

The first Swain was Robert early 1700s, his son Robert Jnr and wife Elizabeth Fielden lost four children between 1795/96, all buried in St Bartholomew's. They went on to have another son James, who married a Margaret Birtwistle of Great Mitton, in 1819, a marriage it took me a long time to find having always searched Lancashire, but Great Mitton was in Yorkshire. They had seven children, and he, I believe, was a lay preacher in the Clayton St Methodist Church in Blackburn. He was also the “Poor law Guardian” for Great Harwood, sitting on the Blackburn Board of Guardians. In 1847, James had a tragic accident; he came out of a field on Blackburn Rd after falling off his cart and fell under it. He was taken into the Lomax Arms where he made a last minute will and then died.

Ian Fairclough made a wonderful discovery of property and land belonging to James being sold in 1856, being six cottages known as Stopes Fold, land to east and west known as Higher and Lower Croft, land to the North known as “The Whins”, and the site upon which the Commercial Hotel is now built. The mystery was, if he died in 1847, why was the land not sold until 1856? This was solved by his Will in which he stated:

“ I give and bequeath to each and all my children all and every kind of property I have to share and share alike to be, theirs when my youngest child shall attain the age of twenty one”

Until that time his wife Margaret carried on running the farm.

Wish my old aunts were still alive. Why didn't I ask the questions then that I would like to ask now?

Swain Fold house is still standing although much modernised, the outline of the old farmyard can still be seen in the old walls, but where the shippen (a cow shed) stood is now a residential home. Originally, the address was 19 Delph Rd, but it is now accessed from Edward St.

Trevor Swain