IN 1987, canalside homes at Lower Audley, Blackburn, were being knocked down - to make way for the creation in 1990 of the new homes and apartments of the town's Water's Edge development.

But though the houses are gone on Lower Audley Street, in parallel Helen Street and Baines Street and in Culvert Street, backing on to the Leeds-Liverpool Canal canal, they are visited still by one of their former inhabitants.

For, struck by the change the area has undergone, 77-year-old local history buff Hubert Hartley, who was born at No.48 Baines Street, has begun digging into its past to find how it was at the time of the 1891 census.

His study takes in the wedge of land bounded by the canal, Park Road and Lower Audley Street - which now accommodates not just the new homes at the Water's Edge, but also the Blackburn Arena ice rink and the large retail development that includes the Asda supermarket.

The research, which may eventually be included in a book planned by fellow local history researcher Alan Duckworth, of Darwen, is, he says, still at the groundwork stage. But he has already discovered that in the distant days when the 1894 Ordnance Survey map showed this 40-acre block of inner Blackburn including not just a dense huddle of housing and quaintly-named terraces such as Joiner's Row, Meadow Lane and Friday Street, but also a mill, a gasometer, a school and a Congregational Chapel, the small neighbourhood was as big as small village in terms of its population and number of homes.

"There were 3,423 people in 701 houses, most of which were two-up, two-down while most of the properties on street corners were shops which very often were larger with four bedrooms," says Hubert, of Waverley Road, Knuzden. The density of the housing and of the population is also stressed by his finding frequent instances among the 1891 census returns of those pocket-sized homes being occupied by up to a dozen people - and that a lot of the homes had to rely on "tub" toilets for sanitation.

Indeed, the census 90 years later was to identify Lower Audley as having the worst concentration of unfit houses in Blackburn and showed that two-thirds were lacking inside toilets - factors which led to clearance plans being confirmed in 1984 and the area's £30 million renewal becoming the the town's biggest redevelopment project for 20 years.

Lake-ing about when dad was just a lad

IN our readers' letters page last month, Darwen exile Mr G. Pilkington recalled how, 60 and more years ago, folk used to flock in their hundreds to the now-drained Jack's Key Lodge reservoir off Bolton Road on sunny Sundays.

Now reader Mrs Mavis Taylor recalls how her father, Robert Aspen, who was 90 when he died three years ago, told how he and his friends used to sail on boats on the lodge. A picture postcard view of the period described the reservoir as "Whitehall Boating Lake." Few Darreners called it that and not many gave it the name of Jack's Key Lodge either as most knew it just as "Jack Kay's."

But says Mrs Taylor, of Ellison Fold Terrace, Darwen: "It was very deep. Many people have drowned up there and my father once told me that a horse and cart fell in, but I have never read of that anywhere."

Now reduced to a few rivulets and with plans for its restoration as a leisure lake looking to have been shelved, the lodge had its plug pulled following the 1971 closure after nearly 150 years of paper-making on the site of Darwen Paper Mill - once Lancashire's biggest - which it served and because its dam later needed repair.

Somme legacy of Cpl Ainsworth

KILLED in the 1916 slaughter on the Somme, 40-year-old Darwen corporal Arnold Ainsworth left a legacy across the Atlantic that fascinates his namesakes there still.

For as he volunteered for the Army, he sent a family tree to his cousin Albert in America - having promised to compile one when he had visited him earlier at his home in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

Arnold, who was serving with a machine gun crew when he was killed, asked for the return of the family tree once Albert was done with it, but also said that if he did not come back from the war, it was to be his bequest to him.

Wallpaper designer Albert left his home in Tockholes Road, Darwen, with his wife, Ethel, and their six children in 1902 when he took a job with a wallpaper company in the United States and, in turn, was to pass on the family history - which Arnold had traced back to Albert's great-great grandfather, James Ainsworth, born at Pinfold, Darwen, in 1756 - to his descendants in America. Today, that family tree is the key to the quest by Albert's great grandson, John C. Ainsworth, of Columbus, New Jersey, for still more English ancestors and for distant relatives who are still alive.

And there must be plenty of them for John tells 'Looking Back' that his great-great-great-great grandfather, Richard Ainsworth, who was the second son of James, married three times and had a total of 23 children.

"Our family tree really spreads out from there," he says. "But Arnold basically wrote information concerning immediate family and I am sure that there are other distant relatives living who are not recorded or their parents and grandparents are not also."

John's father, Richard, came twice to Darwen many years ago and obtained some further information on the Ainsworths, but they hope that readers may help them past the dead end they have reached.

Clues to their family ties include the names of the wives of daddy-of-'em-all Richard who died in 1849, aged 68 - Martha, Hannah and Jane (Kenyon) - and that of emigrant Albert's spouse, Ethel Hothersall, whom he married in 1888.

Rings a bell? Let John know at 188 Juliustown Road, Columbus, NJ 08022, USA, or by e-mail at jctaains@prodigy.net or via his father at onevicar@aol.com

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