So in the past I’ve introduced you to my home city of Sheffield and this week I was wondering what had changed in the city that my ancestors would have known and that was no longer there or been adapted.

So the biggest change is in industry. Sheffield was synonymous with steel production, blade making and the cutlery industry. So much of this has now gone. Don’t get me wrong it does still take place in the city but not on the scale it did. When you went through the census returns the men were working in the steel mills, as blade forgers, blade grinders or making cutlery or even scissors. Even the women were working in the industry. So many of them worked as buffer girls which were the women who polished up the cutlers once it was made so it was ready for sale.
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I was also thinking about the way the building in the city centre have changed. In my life time building have come and gone. I miss the Town Hall extension which was lovingly names the egg boxes. So what big changes have there been?

So one change my ancestor may notice happened to the City Hall. This is a massive performance venue in the city that hosts concerts, plays and so much more. It was completed in the 1930’s. Now during the WW2 a bomb exploded in the square outside the hall. If you visit look at the pillars that were once pristine but now they have shrapnel wounds in them. I always find it fitting that the war memorial for the city stands in the square where the bomb fell.

Another massive change would be to the churches in the city. The Cathedral had an extension in the 1960’s and it’s off the period. It’s so different from the medieval church building. It’s a very marmite addition (you either love it or you hate it). Another big change would be that St Paul’s church next to the Town Hall is no longer there. It was built in the early 1700’s as the other churches couldn’t cope with the growing population. By 1937 the church had virtually no congregation so it shut and was pulled down. My ancestors may even has gone there as some lived locally to it.
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In 1905 King Edward VII and Queen Alexander opened Firth Court at the University of Sheffield. It is a grand building and my ancestors certainly would have known the building as again some lived in the area. By 1971 it had a new building next to it which was designed in the 1960’s. It was built using the same coloured bricks but the styles were completely different. 

​Now I know this is a minor change but it’s a change no the less. In Sheffield next to the Town Hall is a police box. It was installed in 1928 and is still there and it’s even a listed building. The change is that it now says South Yorkshire Police on it instead of just Sheffield Police as it was when it was built. South Yorkshire didn’t exist until 1974 when it was formed from the West Riding of Yorkshire. So in a way another that’s another change. The city didn’t move but it moved county.

​There will be so many things throughout the City that have changed since my ancestors were around. The fact I’m even calling it a city is different as from 1297 to 1893 it was a town. So why not think about what has changed in your area that you ancestors would have known.

So this week I thought I tell you all about my home city of Sheffield, and the past residents who are still living there.

Growing up I always heard the stories of ghosts related to the city as 2 haunted places were within a few miles of where I lived. The first was around Beauchief Abbey a former monastery and the hall just up the road. There is a white lady who is associated with the grounds of both locations has been seen on the road and also on the golf course which is now on the land the monastery once stood on. There are also sightings of the monks still going about their daily lives.

So let’s move up to Norton and the second location I knew about as a child, Bunting Nook. This is a small road by the church which has at least 3 ghosts. Firstly is another grey lady who has been seen but she may be part of the second haunting which is supposedly a couple who were eloping to the church to marry and fell from their horse and died (Norton Church was well known for not asking any question and marrying people even if she was pregnant). Then there is the demonic dog that has been seen as just eyes or even a black mist.
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Fancy wandering around the area surrounding the Cathedral? Voices are heard and faces seen. Is it the dead whose graves were moved in the 1990’s protesting?

Off to Mosborough now and the old hall which is a hotel these days. The grey lady governess can be seen here and the argument between her and her employer can be heard as she threatens to tell his wife of their dalliance. It’s alleged he murdered her to keep her quite.
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Now fancy a visit to a haunted pub, Sheffield has you covered. There are several pubs in the Darnall area where apparitions are seen. In the area of Sheffield I’m from the Woodseats hotel is haunted by a man who has attacked staff. Or how about the former Old Harrow where apparitions were seen and things went missing and then reappeared sometime late. You could always try the Queens Head Inn, possibly the oldest building in Sheffield. You may come across the dog who likes sit by people, the white lady who sits and watches people, the civil war era solider who sits by the fire or even hear the voice of a little girl. Fancy a coffee from a chain then I dare you to try Carbrook Hall near Meadowhall. It’s though Oliver Cromwell’s close ally Colonel Bright can be seen on the stairs as well as another roundhead soldier. Also a spirit likes to throw things around. It may be worse now as it’s well documented that spirits don’t like change and renovations of their space.

Now do you fancy visiting the National Emergency Services Museum in the city? I’ve been years ago, I got a plastic fireman’s helmet. Many groups have been to the venue and seen and heard many unexplained phenomena. Things are thrown when there is no one else around, voices are heard and many believe there is a negative entity who has taken up residence, is it Charlie Peace who was hung for murder?

So do you want to meet Mary Queen of Scots then you need to go to Sheffield Manor Lodge. This is where Mary was held on and off for years. She is seen in a flowing black gown and appears to walk through walls.

Now no discussion about hauntings in the city would be complete without a mention of the Stocksbridge bypass just outside the city. It’s not the road that’s haunted but the land. Even when the road was being built in the 1980’s things were seen. Children where heard playing at night when the site was closed. They were sometimes seen to disappear right in front of people’s eyes. A figure was seen on the bridge being constructed over the road that again just disappeared. 2 policemen witness the torso of a person against the side of their car which move extremely fast to the other side of the car and then vanished. As they drove away the car shook and things were thrown at it but there was no one around. Others have heard what sounds like someone on the roof of the car as they drive along. Finally how about seeing the torso of a monk crossing the road, no legs just a torso, as they walk along at the height the land was at during their lifetime.

So how about a visit to Sheffield?  I’ve never seen anything in city but I’m not visiting the locations at night. I’ve seen things in Derbyshire though.

So happy Halloween and goodnight out there whatever you are! (If you know where this quote came from then you had an awesome childhood).

On the 11th March 1864 the then town of Sheffield suffered from a devastating flood which brought death and destruction. But what caused it?
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Well in basic terms the dam wall at the Dale Dyke dam failed sending the contents of the newly constructed reservoir crashing down the valley straight for the town.

The Dale Dyke dam wall failed whilst it was being filed for the first time. The night the wall failed Sheffield was hit by a gale which caused the water to put excess pressure on the newly finished dam wall. The dam engineer John Gunson was onsite on the night of the collapse. It’s said that he noticed the crack and opened the values to reduce the pressure on the wall in an attempt to stop a collapse. However the wall failed and approximately 3 million cubic metres of water rushed out of the reservoir and into the Loxley valley. Now if you’re like me that figure means nothing but in terms of pints of beer that’s 5,279,261,959. The water swept through the north of the town from the west to the east. The flood hit the areas of Loxley, Malins Bridge and Hillsborough first following the path of the river Loxley. Loxley at the time actually wasn’t in Sheffield as the town hadn’t grown out that far yet. It was an industrial area down in the valley being home to several trip hammers and rolling mills. One was owned by the Chapman family. When the flood hit the mill and hammer were lost and 5 members of the family died along with around 12 other people in the area.

Hillsborough was next where around 42 people died as the water took everything in its path. The water then carried on down the river valley and the turned where the Loxley joins the river Don. This took the water straight towards the industrial areas of the city. For anyone who knows the city today that where Kelham Island museum and the Wicker Archers are. This took the water through Neepsend and Shalesmoor on towards Attercliffe. This area was highly populated at the time and so the loss of life was great.

In total the disaster claimed the lives of around 240 people of all ages. The youngest recorded death shows a baby Dawson of just 2 days old. Many of the victims were never found as the water took them away. Some bodies were even found the other side of Rotherham in the areas of Kilnhurst and Swinton some 14 miles away. Also the flood destroyed and damaging around 600 homes and washing away the houses contents. There was also the loss of animals and crops and infrastructure such as the bridges over the rivers Loxley and Don.

The people of the town has raised around £42,000 (around £2.5 million in today’s terms) to help those in need. Also an act of parliament meant that the people of the town could make claims against the Sheffield Water Company who had built the reservoir for loss of property and life as well as for injuries.
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As always a court case ensued and John Gunson got the blame, although the water company stood by him and kept him in the company until he died. The dam was rebuilt in in the 1870’s and is still there today. If you want to go it’s near Bradfield on Strines Moor just of the A57 not far from the reservoirs in the Derwent Valley.

This is where the flood becomes kind of personal to me. My family lived around the Hillsborough area. In November of 1864 my 3 times great Grandparents Charles Beckett and Eliza Parkin married at St Philips church in Shalesmoor. The church obviously survived, but were they affected in any way. Did the loose friends? My research doesn’t indicate they lost any family and there are no familiar names in the lists of the dead which is part of the fantastic research carried out by Karen Lightowler in conjunction with Sheffield City Council and Sheffield Hallam University. You can see the research here: https://www2.shu.ac.uk/sfca/  . It is a fantastic resource. The claims section does show that Charles Becket did make a claim for loses though. He was a quarry man and claimed £13 (around £812 today) for loses of personal possession such as tables and chairs but also the tools he used in the quarry such as his hammers and picks. He was awarded only £9. Also there were claims made by who I believe to be my 4 times great Grandfather George Parkin and by 2 members of the Elshaw family who I must be related to as we are all descended from one man.
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So the flood left a trail of devastation in its wake that would change the town and wiped out entire families such as the Chapmans who lost a mother, father and 3 sons. But out of the devastation it gave us genealogists and fantastic insight into our ancestor’s lives as we can read the claims for loses and get a feel for how they lived and how the flood impacted on our lives.

Oh no it isn’t, Oh yes it is!

So it’s the time of year where families go to see pantomimes throughout the land. Some are in small village halls and others are in theatres of the West End in London. For some of us it’s the only time a year where we go to a theatre for others it’s just another visit. For me it was a massive family outing on New Year’s Eve to the City Hall in Sheffield to see the brilliant panto by Manor Operatic, one of the largest amateur theatre companies in Britain.
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This got me thinking about how few theatres there are in Sheffield, my home town, as opposed to when my Great Grandparents were young in the city.

So I decided to look into this. Who knew there was a website dedicated to the theatres of the past? You can see this site at: http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/index.html

I didn’t just look at this site though I knew there were other theatres which were not listed on this site. So I looked through the picture archive at Picture Sheffield at: http://www.picturesheffield.com/ I searched for theatres and found pictures of even more.

So in total I found Sheffield has had 31 theatres over the years. Most of them were found in the city centre and they had a habit of changing their names so it may appear there were more.
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The oldest theatre I found was opened in 1773 on Tudor Street. It was called the Theatre Royal. It remained open until 1935 when the building was destroyed by fire and subsequently demolished. In its time the theatre was thought to be one of the best outside London, but I’m sure most places felt theirs were the best. For those of you who know Sheffield the current Crucible Theatre in Tudor Square, home of the World Snooker Championship, sits on the site of the Theatre Royal.

The most recent theatre to be built was in fact the Crucible Theatre on the site of the Theatre Royal. In some ways this is nice as it means the site has been used for entertainment since 1773. Admittedly the Crucible didn’t open until 1971 so there was a mere 36 year gap, but who’s counting. The Crucible theatre has several stages with the main one having a capacity of 900.

The theatre which had the largest capacity was the Alexandra Music Hall, which had also been called the Alexandra Theatre and the Adelphi Theatre. This theatre was opened in 1837 and remained open until 1914. The building was subsequently demolished to widen a road. The theatre was at the junction of Furnival Road and Blonk Street close to where Ladys Bridge is. At its height the auditorium could hold between 3000 and 4000. Considering the population of Sheffield in 1861 was 161,000 it’s not actually that many residents could go at once, but even so.

Sheffield has a tiny theatre. It’s called the Lantern Theatre. It was built by a rich industrialist as his private theatre and was used by his children to put on performances. It was built in 1893 in the Nether Edge area of the city. It holds a huge audience of …..84. The theatre is still in use today.

Currently in Sheffield there are only 7 theatres remaining, not including the massive arena, which hold over 13,000. These are the Crucible, the Lyceum, the Library, the Montgomery, the City Hall, the Merlin and the Lantern. The thing that amuses me though is that the Crucible, the Lyceum and the Library theatres are in the same square.

There are more plays going on though. Church halls throughout Sheffield hold amateur plays throughout the year as well as school halls and other venues.

I suppose with the advent of cinema the theatres couldn’t compete and they shut, although many of the Sheffield theatres became cinemas and some did maintain small theatres in them. Then telly came along and started to kill off the cinemas as well. Most people of my parent’s generation went to the cinema every week and most suburbs of the city had a cinema. Where I grew up the cinema building was  half mile walk away. It’s a pub now and was a supermarket when I was a kid. These days in Sheffield there are only huge multiplex cinemas. I don’t really know since the last film I saw at the cinema was Jurassic Park in 1993!
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So how we are entertained may have changes, but I know one thing for sure. My Great Grandparents had a lot of options on where to go and see plays and music hall.

Now we’ve all heard of the great fire of London which happened in 1666, but have you ever considered how it would affect your family history research?
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I’ll start with some background. The fire started on the 2nd September 1666 in Pudding Lane, London which was only a few streets north of the river Thames. The fire started in a bakery and raged within the old city walls of the city from the Strand to the Tower of London and as far north as the Guildhall until the 6th September. During this time hundreds of people were made homeless and had to flee the city. Surprisingly only 6 people are reported to have died in the fire. Also in the fire the plague rats died!

Now here is where the fire impacts of family history research. 89 parish churches were lost in the fire including St Pauls. 35 of these churches were never rebuilt.
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So what does this mean to family historians? Well it means you have to readjust what you know. The fire resulted in people having to move from the area they lived in. So if you have been happily tracing your family back through one church in London and then you can’t find anymore ancestors it may be because they were new to the church just after 1666.

So what do you do? Well the best place to start is probably to find out which parish churches were lost in the fire and find out which ones were closest to where your ancestors lived after 1666. Although this will not give you an accurate indication of where they moved from, it may help. Families may have wanted to stay as close as possible to where they lived and worshiped before as they worked in the area. On the other hand they may have move away as they needed housing and where they worked may have been destroyed in the fire.

So how do you overcome this? Well don’t just focus on the immediate area. If you can’t find what you’re looking for expand your search. Also focus on what you know. If you ancestors were having children baptised at a church from a certain date but you haven’t found the couple’s marriage there then maybe they had to move church because it was lost in the fire. So from here you need to look around the other churches. Also make a note of any occupations listed on the children’s baptisms. This can help you if you find a couple with the same names in another church. If the man has the same occupation then there is a chance it is your ancestors. This may not always follow though as they may have had to change job after the fire. If your ancestors have an unusual surname then it is relatively easy to find where they came from. Sorry to anyone with the name Smith as this will be difficult, but congratulation if you have got back this far, you are a genealogy hero.

It has not been only the great fire of London that has caused problems like this. There have been many disasters over the years that may have resulted in your family having to move. If you have ancestors from Sheffield you may suddenly find them disappearing as you go back. What may people don’t know is that in 1864 Sheffield had a “great flood” when a newly built dam wall cracked and the town was flooded. 240 people died and over 600 homes were lost. If your ancestors seem to suddenly appear in say north Sheffield it could be they came from west Sheffield where the destruction occurred. 

The same moving of your ancestors could also have happened if they were miners. Over the years they have been many mining disasters which may have led to the closures of the pit. Your ancestors may have had to move to new coal filed to get new jobs and so all of a sudden the Northumberland family you thought you had is now in Yorkshire.
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So although we don’t like to think about disasters such as the great fire they do have an influence on our research as they change the lives of our ancestors. So remember it may not be a brick wall you’ve hit, it may be relocation.

​These days all we see are the shells of the former monastic buildings and probably think no more about it, but monasteries have always held an interest to me. When I was growing up in Sheffield I lived less than 1 mile from Beauchief Abbey and every winter the land around the Abbey became a popular place to go. The land next to the Abbey church (which is all that is left standing and is still used today) is a municipal golf course in the city and has a rather long steep hill, excellent to sledging!

Beauchief Abbey was established in Derbyshire in 1183 after the land was given by Robert FitzRanulph who was the Lord of Alfreton.
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Beauchief Abbey was run by the Premonstratensian order or white cannons. They served as priests for the surrounding churches and worked within the community. They also had farms, fish pond and a smithy on the nearby river Sheaf (the source of the city of Sheffield’s name). The abbey continued serving the community through until 1537 when the abbey surrender itself to King Henry VIII during his dissolution of the monasteries when he moved away from Catholicism and made himself the head of the Church of England.  Beauchief Abbey was one of the first to go as it was 1536 that the change began. Initially the monasteries were just reformed, not dissolved. Then the abbey and land was sold to Sir Nicholas Strelley for £223(now approximately £72,000). Today Strelley Avenue and Strelley Road still exist within Sheffield (Beauchief is now an area of Sheffield and in the county of Yorkshire). The buildings of the abbey continued to be used until the 1660’s when they were taken down to build the nearby Beauchief Hall for Edward Pegg. He and his decedents continued to use the church building as their private chapel. In the 1930’s the Pegg family gave the land and buildings to the Sheffield Corporation. Much of the land became Beauchief municipal golf course and the Abbey itself still hold services to this day, albeit small services as the building is really small. In the 1950’s the Abbey building was made a scheduled monument.

​What did the closure of the Abbey’s mean for the population of the country as a whole. Well in general terms things became worse for our ancestors. The monks may have taken care of the spiritual needs of the community, but they also provided many other ways they helped the community. Anyone who has ever read the Brother Cadfael novels by Ellis Peters will know Cadfael was an apothecary who helped heal the medical problems of not only the Abbey, but also the town and surrounding villages. This fairly factual as the abbeys were well known for have infirmaries to tend the sick and injured. Many of the larger abbeys also acted as lodging houses where travellers and pilgrims could get board and lodgings.
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The main way the abbeys aided the community though was through employment. They abbey needed workers to survive. With the number of religious duties they had to preform they had no time for the everyday tasks. They employed farmer, labourers, stone masons, gardeners, cooks, housekeeper, laundry workers and many others. When the abbeys closed all these people would have lost their jobs and others would be hard to come by. This would have impacted the wider community as rent and bills couldn’t be paid and families may have become destitute. If you became destitute who would you turn to? The monasteries! So a vicious circle began.

In the end if you ignore the religious aspect of the monasteries the dissolution damaged the communities surrounding them. It left the skeletons of the buildings behind to decay and be pulled down for the stone. In most cases all that’s left is the main church buildings, if anything at all. One of the most famous abbey churches still being used today is Westminster Abbey (which is actually called the Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster).

​So it is possible that the dissolution of the monasteries impacted your ancestors whether directly through losing their jobs or indirectly by the loss of the service the abbeys bought to the communities.

Sheffield, the place I called home for 27 years is a large city with a village feel. Sheffield is somewhat of a forgotten city despite being the 5th largest in the UK. The most people know about Sheffield is that it has 2 universities, Sheffield University and Sheffield Hallam University and is the home of the World Championship snooker every year at the Crucible Theatre. But what else do people know, well I bet it’s not about the cities unique landscape and history.

Sheffield developed at the point where 5 rivers merged, the Porter, the Don, the Sheaf (which gives the city its name), the Loxley and the Riverlin and is built on 7 hills. The city has in excess of 2 million tress (although the council seems to like removing them!) which makes it one of the most wooded cities in Europe and was once part of the ancient woodland than covered most of the ancient kingdom of Mercia.

There has been a settlement in the area for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until after the Norman Conquest in 1066 that a more permanent settlement developed. Sheffield got its first castle in the early 12th century. It was built by William de Lovetot, but was destroyed in 1266 along with the rest of the town during the Barons War. A new castle was begun in 1270 by Thomas de Furnival (there is a street called Furnival Gate still in the city). Whilst it was in the ownership of the 6th Earl of Shrewsbury and his wife Bess of Hardwick (a local woman who is a former incumbent of Chatsworth House (her descendent became the Dukes of Devonshire) and a friend of Queen Elizabeth) Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned in the castle as well as at the nearby Sheffield Manor for 14 years. The Furnival castle was damaged by an earthquake in 1574 (in my life Sheffield has experience 2 little ones) and was eventually destroyed in 1648 on the orders of Parliament during the Civil War as the castle was held for the King. Today the ruins of the castle are under the former Castle Market, but will be examined over the coming years as the site is developed. The oldest building in the city is the Queens Head Pub possibly built around the 1470’s. It is still a pub today.
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Sheffield has suffered many times over the years.
1000’s – Settlement destroyed during the Harrying of the North.
1266 – Town destroyed during the Barons War.
1537 – Beauchief Abbey was closed during the dissolution of the monasteries. The Cannons who lived here did much for the local community, including acting as the local clergy.

1640’s – 1660’s – Impact of the Civil War
1832 – Cholera epidemic hits Sheffield as a result of poor living conditions due to the industrial revolution. 400+ died as a result and are remembered today at the Cholera Monument in Norfolk Park.
1864 – The great Sheffield Flood hit the city when the Dale Dike dam wall fails. 270 people died in the floods which hit the Loxley end of the city, but got as far as the city centre and where the current M1 motorway runs past Meadowhall (which was a highly industrialised area).
1940 – On the nights of the 12th to the 15th of December Sheffield is heavily bombed by the Germans during the Sheffield Blitz. My own family was affected as my Grandparents were bombed out of their lodgings. They were in the Abbeydale cinema across the road at the time. They were unhurt, as was their landlady. They moved in with their landlady’s family and remained there until after the war. The friendship continued and my Mum and her Brother regarded them as surrogate grandparents.
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Sheffield is the proud home of steel and is known as the Steel City. It was in the 1740’s that Benjamin Huntsman developed a new process in the production of steel which lead to much more strength than any steel previously made using the crucible method (the containers it was made in). In the 1860’s Sir Henry Bessemer was instrumental in turning Sheffield into the powerhouse of steel manufacture. He built factories using his Bessemer converter method which put oxygen in to the iron to get rid of the impurities, thus the steel was of much better quality. In 1913 Harry Brearley developed the process of stainless steel in the city which revolutionised the way steel could be used. 

Stainless steel also revolutionised another important industry that has been prevalent in the city for hundreds of years. Cutlery, razor and blade making. Since the 1600’s Sheffield had been the centre of cutlery manufacture in England. Most of my ancestors from the city and the surrounding environs were involved in the industry. They were sickle and scythe makers for farming and pocket and pen blade forgers and razor grinders for everyday use. By being able to make cutlery out of stainless steel it didn’t tarnish with use and was cheaper than having silver. Today the city still has a Master Cutler and a Cutlers Hall which was built in 1832 and is a grade 2* listed building.

There are many famous people from the city including those already mentioned. Helen Sharman was the first Briton in space and she went to the same secondary school I did (although she left 10 years before I went and the school’s name had changed, but it was the same buildings).

The city has had 2 recipients of the Victory Cross medal, William Barnsley Allen VC, DSO, MC and Arnold Loosemore VC DCM, both for gallantry during WW1.

In the sporting world we have Joe Root the current England Test Cricket Captain was born and raised in the city. Good luck in the Ashes! Also Michael Vaughan the former England Test Cricket Captain (I know he wasn’t born here, but he did live here).

People from the world of music born in the city include, Joe Cocker, Jarvis Cocker and Pulp, Paul Carrick, Def Leppard and the Human League amongst others.
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So next time you think of Sheffield, remember the city does exist and I’m proud of the city as its where many of my ancestors were born and bred, as was I.