WHEN Doreen Friar wrote from Australia, seeking help from our readers in researching her British family roots, she received a quick answer.

Not from the St Helens area - but from 'up the road' in Queensland!

Which certainly gives an international flavour to my personal 'World' of words.

Doreen, daughter of an old-time Haydock shopkeeper, tells me: "The woman in Queensland remembered my mother's shop. I used to go to school with one of her sisters.

"Since then," adds Doreen, now settled in Gosnells, Western Australia, "I've got a lot more information from relations, plus photographs and old picture postcards dating back to 1910."

A happy outcome, indeed, to her round-the-globe search.

And as a result of her venture down the genealogical trail (she intends to write an autobiography from her findings) it's possible that I have vague family connections with Doreen.

Certain of my forebears lived in Rainford. And in an 1891 Census from that particular village, Doreen discovered that one of her distant relatives, Walter Topping, was the adopted son of Alexander and Ann Whalley of 81 Ormskirk Road.

It's an even smaller world than I thought!

And Doreen had another surprise up her sleeve, in the shape of a feature article I wrote 30-odd years ago about her shopkeeper mother, Elizabeth Logan.

Unfortunately, the photostat copy doesn't bear a date, so I can't pinpoint just when I penned that item - but I have clear recollections of Lizzie Logan and her little shop in West End Road, Haydock.

New houses now stand where that little family general store once stood, just up from Ebenezer Street, but by the time she put up shutters Mrs Logan had carved out something of a record.

A ladylike person, she spent 65 years behind that counter, earning a reputation for never having lost her quiet composure throughout the long span of lean times and good ones, taking in two world wars.

She had ambitions to become a teacher, but her studies were cut short at 15 when she was required to help her mother with the shop which opened 15 hours a day (8am to 11pm). Bacon then cost eightpence a pound and a loaf tuppence-halfpenny.

Supermarkets were just beginning to edge in when Mrs Logan called it a day. And she has proved to have been something of a prophet - for her final comment on shutting up shop three decades or so ago was: "The tradition of running errands to the corner shop for little forgotten extras will keep the small trader in existence. But I suppose the small shops will be thinned out a lot."

Her daughter Doreen also posted me copies of snapshots featuring Haydock and St Helens personalities from yesteryear, including the famous bakery owner, Saints official and all-round sports fan Lionel Swift; an outsized character in every sense of the word.

Lionel is featured playing bowls with Doreen's dad, Herbert Logan, a stalwart of the Men's Sodality of Blackbrook St Mary's.

Among others peering back from the past, and well remembered by the district's older generation, include publican Pimblett of the Ship Inn, Blackbrook, Joe Morris who had an ironmongers in Church Street, the four well-known Banks brothers from Haydock, Joe Topping, who lived at The Bungalow (a converted timber-built first world war hospital still standing in Ebenezer Street where pet dogs were boarded) and Jack Topping, talented chorister in his day.

Most were related in some way to Doreen who has a suitcase full of research and memories waiting to be compiled into a book.

IF anyone can further add to Doreen's family history, then she'd welcome the information. Her address is: 'Marramoleda', 36 Shearwater Way, Gosnells, Western Australia, 6110.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.