Thomas Anderson : Short Biography

Thomas Anderson

Thomas Anderson was a labourer who lived in County Mayo; his son, my great grandfather John Anderson, was born in County Mayo and emigrated, probably on his own as an adult, to Lancashire. Our best guess (I have two cousins with whom I research the family history) is that John was born around 1825. We guess that he may have come over to Lancashire around the beginning of the potato famine, because the first evidence of his living there is his marriage to an Irish woman, Ann Maginnis, in Manchester in 1847. They had one child, also called John; after Ann died John (senior) married Margaret Bell (from Carlisle). They continued to live in the Manchester area and had five children, one of whom, Thomas, died in infancy, and another of whom was my grandfather James, of whom there is one known photo. James married Edith Hulme and had nine children, of whom my father, also called James, was the fifth; two of the children died in infancy. Edith died in 1928 of TB and James in 1929 of pneumonia, and the children were dispersed into the family homes of relatives (if they were very lucky) and into orphanages (if they were less lucky). One of them, the eldest surviving child, Eric, was awarded the MBE in 1968 for his services to Fire Service Training. My father died in 2019, aged 101.

John himself died in March 1909, aged 83; he is buried in a pauper's grave in Philips Park Cemetery, Manchester, and is named on the gravestone, which was kindly uncovered at my request by the staff of the cemetery. He has many descendants from the four of his children who are known to have had children themselves, some of whom are unknown to us because we haven't yet been able to trace them. I live in Ramsbottom, north of Bury; my cousin Richard Anderson lives near Macclesfield; and our cousin Karl lives near Sheffield. We are all direct descendants of Thomas and all have children ourselves, so the family continues to spread.

Richard has done extensive research on the possible identity of Thomas Anderson, and the most likely one, although the family connection cannot yet be proved, seems to be to a man who is named in Griffith's Valuation (therefore, mid-19th century) and lived in Cross West, and possibly later in Cong village. The theory that he may have moved from Cross to Cong arises from the large number of minor offences attributable, thanks to Griffith's Valuation, to a person or persons called Thomas Anderson; these offences mostly relate to Cross West in the 1850s and to Cong in the 1860s and 1870s.

Cameron Anderson, May 2022