Can you help?

Wigan Born and Bred? this includes Ashton

I have received the following letter from Julia Bennett of Manchester University. If you can help please contact me on 736216 or Christine Charnock on 244991.

Are you from round here? Maybe you can help me...

I want to collect the stories of the everyday lives of Wigan families, why they have stayed in Wigan, why some have moved away. Following down the different generations to see what stays the same and what changes (for example, more of the younger generations go to university). How do family stories change and get passed on, where ‘a member of my family’s probably lived in this street since the turn of the century’ does this put pressure on the younger generation to stay put (as can happen on family farms)?

The idea for this research comes from previous work I did talking to farmers, many of them lived in the house they had grown up in and one farm had been in the same family for seven generations. All had a strong emotional attachment to ‘their’ land. I wondered about people who live in towns, could they ever have that same level of attachment to their place? Wigan, due to its stable population, seems an ideal place to test out this theory.

The longer you’ve lived in a place the more people you’re likely to know:‘when I go up Wigan I bet I meet about 70 people, hello, hello and you know all the family history don’t you, you know, through the generations’ and ‘Growing up I found it quite hard actually, especially when I was about the age 18, 19 when I was going for a drink, everywhere I went I’d see people me mum knew’. How does it feel to live in the kind of community where ‘everyone knows everyone’ ?

I am looking for families who have at least two, ideally three or more, generations living in Wigan, where all are Wigan born and bred. I would like to interview one or two from each generation about their lives, in a very open way, I don’t have a fixed list of questions. I expect each interview to take about an hour. I would like at least one person from each family to complete a photo diary over the course of a week, taking photos of each place visited and making brief notes about who they met there. I can supply cameras. People who have done this so far have said how much they enjoyed it. This will be followed by another shorter interview to discuss the content of the diary.

All identities will be disguised, taking part is completely confidential. This research is for my PhD in Sociology at the University of Manchester; I expect some of the findings to be published in the future.