Billinge families

GASKELL

(extracted from the main text)

My great grandfather, James Gaskell, was born 22nd July 1838, a year before the Chartist riots and two years before the Penny Post was introduced. He was born when the Tokugawa Shogunate still ruled Japan, ten years before Marx and Engles published the Communist Manifesto and twenty years before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. He died 2nd May 1908 aged 69, six months before his third daughter married my grandfather. It is almost certain that he was the only person ever to have lived in this area after experiencing, first hand, the American Civil War. He is buried at St. Oswald's, Ashton, with his wife, Mary Ann. That she would live on, through a war even more appalling in its squandering of human life than the one he experienced, is a something he could hardly have imagined. How could he have imagined the unimaginable? She died 10th September 1928 aged 88. Great grandfather James' parents were James and Cecily nee Burgess. James Gaskell married Cecily Burgess on 25 January 1831 at St. Oswald's, Winwick, and John Gaskell married Jane Burgess on 28 April 1828, also at Winwick. It looks as if great, great grandfather James and his brother John may have married two sisters. We presume, from my great aunt Cecily's letter to her sister Helen - my grandmother - that the parents of these two brothers Gaskell were William and Ellen from Low Bank Farm. This letter is the only document that has passed down to my generation that gives any indication of the lives of our ancestors. Reading through that one short page made me feel that I could somehow reach out into the past and touch it. It prompted me to compile this rendition of family history.