| When I received it a few days later, the certificate listed my granddad's parents as George Swarbrick and Sarah Eleanor Pomfret.
In 1953 no one - not even my grandfather - disputed this information. No one other than granddad knew his parent's names to begin with and, if he did see the
document, he didn't object. At St. Catherine's House I spent several hours searching the Birth, Death and Marriage indexes. In short order I was able to find the marriage certificate for his parents, George and Sarah, and the birth certificate of an older brother, John. |
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| The location given on all of these documents was Preston, Lancashire but I decided that, since he always claimed to have been born and raised
in Glasgow, I would begin my search there. After a week in Glasgow and several trips to the Registry Office in Edinburgh, I could find no trace of Richard Swarbrick or his father George ever having lived in Scotland. The next step was to head back to England, so I boarded a train for Preston. |
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| I spent a month in Preston, dividing my time between the Lancashire Records Office and the Harris Museum and Library. In the beginning
it was slow going, but soon the information started to trickle in. By the end of the second week I had found the baptism records for Richard and 13 brothers and sisters. I also found that his father had been one of 10 children. I visited the churches where George had married Sarah, where George's father Richard had married his wife Mary, and where many of the children had been baptized. I visited the houses that they had lived in, and walked through the graveyards to their final resting places. One thing was puzzling me. Granddad said that he was disowned by his Catholic family for marrying my grandmother but all of these marriages, baptisms and burials were recorded in the registers of Church of England churches. Were they Catholic or weren't they? |
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