Wigan Album

Great photo - I wonder what Tilly is short for, come to that what is Minnie short for?

Minnie is short for Amelia and Tilly is short for Matilda

think tilly may be short for letticia , and ill bet that bacon was good to eat

is that building still there

Thank you for your replies Antar and Winnie - I have Donnelly on my mother's family tree which I find is often spelt in different ways.

1901 census shows the occupants, all born in Ireland, as Thomas Lennon 25 year old grocer.Nieces Minnie 21 and Matilda V Donnelley 19.Peter McCabe,14, grocer's carter.

Minnie can also be the short term for Minerva, Wilhelmina, Hermione and Miriam.

The old post office at the bottom of Station Rd, When i lived in Garswood it belonged to the Finagan Family, I think there were two sisters & Old Mick , as we called him, he walked with a very bad limp due to an accident on Garswood Station, He did the butchers side & his daughters looked after the shop & Post Office, It was in the 1940s when i lived there but i think they sold up in the 50s or early 60s,

As well as being an abbreviated or 'pet' version of another name, Minnie was also a baptismal name in its own right.

i remember it being finnigans.

Minnie Donnelly married a Michael Finnegan in 1909.

I think your right winnie , lettie or ettie would be short for leticia

Anyroad, what's a 'Oist' Office??

In 1949 I was working at the Seneley Green drift mine.The fireman there, Bill Yates liked "Pasha" cigarettes and he would send me to the shop for a packet. If you bought Pasha you could have a packet of Woodbines to go with them. I would get the woodbines while Bill had the smelly pashas!!

My grandma used to take me when I was kid late 50s early 60s, I used to look at the long horns on the wall, and watch her cut butter with cheese wire.

The building is still there but alas does not look much like this now as it has been altered. When we moved to Garswood in 1979 it looked very similar to this.

I was born and lived the first 18 years of my life less than 100 yards from this building.
I clearly remember those castellated panels on that wooden fence, so they must still have been there in the 50s.
Just in front of the fence there used to be a wooden bench where all the old blokes used to sit. Some of them, a number of my great uncles included, were wounded veterans of the 1916 Somme offensive.
At that particular time, the lady in charge of the post office was Emma Finnegan. She too, oddly enough struggled with a severe limp. The cause of which I never discovered.
As an infant at St Andrew's school, I was entrusted with the job of taking a bag of threepenny bits and tanners, which comprised the pupils weekly savings, down to the post office once a week to have it put into their T.S.B savings accounts.
This would have been around about the time of Queen Elizabeth's accession to the throne.
I recall the old red phone box in the 60s that required 4 old pennies to make a call, with a button A to press if the connection was successful and a button B to press, to get your money back if the call failed.
This system operated all over the country until the post office got greedy in about 1974.
I don't know when Emma Finnegan vacated the post office, but at around 1969 her position was taken over by John Metcalfe and his wife.
They continued to run the place until John died sometime in the late 90s at a guess, then shortly afterwards, the place closed for good and moved up to what used to be Waterworth's shop in Station road.
I believe it's moved again to what used to be in my day, Cliff Crosby's shop, farther up Station road.

Garswood post office.not Oist office lol

Margaret and John Metcalf had the post office from January 1970 until Sept 2001. John passed away in October 2009