Places   (Help with places, streets and buildings in Wigan.)

Hello Frances.

I am glad to hear you had some success with your family information, Frances. My quest is an effort to find out what happened to Mom's parents and I needed the orphanage records to see how and why the four kids were admitted. Mom was only five, and the eldest when placed in November, 1928 and she had only a few recollections of there being a lot of tension and fights between her Mom and Dad. The records I obtained from Greenfields confirmed her Mom, Clara Ryan (nee Betton) had left and gone to live with somebody else and that left her Dad, William Charles Ryan, with the four little children. He placed the three oldest in Moorfields and the youngest in Greenfields and was actually paying 25 Shillings a month for their upkeep. He got them back in 1933 but seems to have disappeared again within a couple of years. I have not been able to find death records for either parent anywhere in England so far. It would have been very hard back then for a single woman to make it on her own, so I suspect Clara may have remarried at some point, and one or both parents may have simply emmigrated elsewhere. Going to be quite a challenge figuring it all out and I was hoping to be able to do it while Mom and her three siblings are still alive. But then Life isn't quite as interesting without a little mystery in it!

David