History and Traditions of Darwen and Its People

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DARWEN AND ITS PEOPLE. BOOK II.-OLD DARWEN FAMILIES. Population of Darwen ? Jeremy Hunt's Unique Position ? Description of Danven at the time of Jeremy's Birth? Jeremy's Authorities on Ancient History ? His Grandmother Marsden Preparation of Jeremy's Recollections for Tile Blackburn Times. AIONG the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DARWEN AND ITS PEOPLE. BOOK II.-OLD DARWEN FAMILIES. Population of Darwen ? Jeremy Hunt's Unique Position ? Description of Danven at the time of Jeremy's Birth? Jeremy's Authorities on Ancient History ? His Grandmother Marsden Preparation of Jeremy's Recollections for Tile Blackburn Times. AIONG the crowded manufacturing towns of Lancashire there is none which has sprung up within a century with such vigorous and healthy growth as that of Darwen. Out of a few hillside hamlets of quaint but thrifty British workmen there has arisen a large town of 30,000 inhabitants, nearly all more or less directly dependent upon the Cottton Trade or the Paper Trade for their daily bread. One of the 30,000, Mr. Jeremy Hunt, aged 80 years,1 is a man with a most remarkable memory for names, dates, and trifling historical incidents. He can sort out the remaining 29,999 of his fellow-townsmen, arrange them into families and clans, distinguish the adventitious from the aborigines, supply a list of births, marriages, and deaths, with correct dates and full details, and bring to light the girlish escapades of nearly everybody's great-great-grandmother. If the Vicar of Wakefield had happened to be a Darruner he need have had no fear of being imposed upon by pretenders claiming without title to be fortieth cousins, for Jeremy would have speedily ascertained the exact relationship which everybody bore to him. Without exaggeration, Jeremy can give, out of the deep recesses of his wonderfully acute and retentive memory, the pedigree of most of the old families belonging to the neighbourhood, and show that people who have no idea of their mutual relat'onship sprang, five or sixgenerations ago, from the same father or mother. The enormous multiplication of the genus homo in the town during his ...