Family History

Family History


Pictured left are Hilda Blease and John Mason: the late parents of Les Mason, and our Nana and Grandpa.

When we knew them, Nana and Grandpa had already retired from their lifelong home in Derby, to settle in North Wales: first in the seaside town of Deganwy, and later in St Asaph. Dad would take us to stay there with them during the long summer holidays and, as they owned a car - an unusual luxury in our family! - our summers were filled with visits to beaches, stately homes and gardens, rivers and parks...places which were inaccessible to us for the rest of the year.
Above - Nana & Grandpa on Dad's first wedding day, 3 June 1960.
Above - Nana & Grandpa's retirement home in North Wales: 43, Roe Parc, St Asaph.
Here, Grandpa worked in his prized vegetable garden behind the house, and spent his free time in carpentry and model-making. We remember Nana as an excellent cook, and a skilled embroiderer. She was also more socially active than Grandpa, and never missed the Monday night whist drive at the new St Asaph Library.
Because even the oldest of us knew Nana and Grandpa for only the last ten years of their lives, we have spent the last few months doing some research into their family background, to try to fill in some of the many gaps in our knowledge of them. As you'll see from the family pedigrees we link to below, most of our research so far has been on the Blease side of the family. (We started there in the expectation that the more unusual surname would be easier to trace than the no-doubt distinguished, yet undeniably common, Mason name).

Read on to find out what we know so far about our illustrious ancestors. If by some miracle you knew any of them, or if you are a family historian researching the same names, why not get in touch to find out what information we can exchange?
The Masons of Lancashire
On Grandpa's side of the family, we are researching the names BROOKS and of course MASON.

The Masons seem to have been a coalmining family who lived and worked throughout the nineteenth century in the mining villages around Wigan, Lancashire: specifically, in Ince-in-Makerfield, and Hindley.
Grandpa broke with family tradition and, instead of becoming a miner, worked all his life as a railwayman. This explains how he came to leave the Wigan area, and settle in the railway city of Derby, where Dad was brought up. As far as we remember, Grandpa was an only child, so we don't expect that we have any close Mason relatives out there. But if you are a Wigan / Hindley / Ince Mason, and are interested in family history why not get in touch to see if we have a link back in the dim and distant past?
The Bleases of Cheshire
Among Dad's maternal ancestors, we are researching the names ATKINSON, HILTON, BURGESS, CHILD, BALL, CARTWRIGHT, STONEHEWER/STONIER, DRACKFORD, HENSHAW/HENSHALL, HAMMOND and FOREST, in addition of course to BLEASE.
From the mid-sixteenth century, the Bleases and their associated families seem to have lived, married and died in a small cluster of townships in eastern Cheshire: particularly Rostherne, Withington / Chelford, Alderley and Newbold Astbury. Here, they made their living primarily as gardeners, millers and farmworkers.

But with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, the Bleases scattered to the growing cities to the north, and this explains how our direct ancestors came to settle in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire. After a brief spell in Church Hulme, our great-great-grandparents, Henry and Mary Emma Blease, left Cheshire for good, and moved to Manchester. They lived briefly in Salford, where our great-grandfather John Edwin Blease was born, then settled down in the grimy industrial town of Ashton, where the family earned their living as cotton weavers. It was here in Ashton that our Nana, Hilda, would be born in 1903, and our father, Les, in 1931.
Nana had at least four siblings: an older brother, Frank; a younger sister, Nellie, who died in infancy; and two older sisters, Florence and Fanny, whom we know very little about except that the oldest of us were taken to meet them in childhood and were struck by how very OLD they seemed! Judging by the gaps between the births of Nana's brother and sisters, there may well have been other siblings that we know nothing about.
Left - The Parish Church of St Michael and All Angels, Ashton-under-Lyne. Hilda Bleases' older siblings were christened here in the 1880's and 1890's.
Unfortunately, we are not in contact with any of their descendants, although we know of the existence of Blease cousins still living in the Greater Manchester area today. In the course of our research, we have also learned that we have more distant Blease relatives in Cumbria, Rhode Island, Massachussetts, Florida and Australia. Are you one of them? If any of the people you have just read about - particularly those closest to Nana - sound familiar, why not get in touch?
Well, if you've stuck with it this far, you might as well go all the way and peruse our detailed pedigree charts, listed below. The first one summarises the little we know about the Mason side of the family; the other seven charts are taken up by the much more prolific Bleases and their associates.


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