I first became interested in the history of the town at school; our history teacher was a local woman who could easily be nudged away from kings and crusades into telling us about the old church and the old mill. Starting work in the library gave me access to published histories, but they always left me with more questions than answers. One book stated that we would never know the location of many places mentioned in old documents – which only made me want to find out as much as possible about how Great Harwood people lived and where they lived in the past. As I worked I found that my ancestors have lived here for hundreds of years – which made it all the more interesting!

When the children fled the nest I decided it was time to acquire some skills to help me find the answers to all the questions and enrolled on a local history course with Lancaster University, later completing a diploma with Oxford Continuing Education. After many years of searching and gathering, and with the help of Ian Fairclough and Cris Kydd as the Great Harwood History Society (now disbanded), it is time to share what we have found, mostly in the form of transcriptions of material, but also drawing together information and writing about what we have discovered. On the shelves of many libraries lie the work of numerous people who have delved into the past of their hometowns, unpublished and unseen and lost to the next generation; this has been a significant motive for creating this site.

There are quite a few published sources for the history of the town, of note are the works of Louie Pollard, and she drew on previous works by Abram, and Farrar and Brownbill. It isn’t my intention to reproduce their work here, but there will eventually be pages dedicated to the history of the town, and a complete list of published works, with links to sites if available.

The menu under the page title, above, will in most cases lead to a further menu of items. Some categories though have too many pages to be listed in the menu, such as Probate, so clicking directly on the category will take you to a full listing.

Gleaned from archives and personal collections many of the records presented here will be, because of copyright restrictions, transcriptions. For accuracy it is always best to check the original source if possible – and if you do find errors please let me know. Comments and queries can be sent to info@greatharwoodhistory.co.uk

Thank you to those who, over the years, have helped with transcriptions of material, and with donations to keep this site running.