Report from Kate Hurst, Ormskirk & District Family History Society

My 4xgreat-grandfather James Grayston was in his late sixties when he died in Aughton, in 1848, but he wasn’t born there and, if circumstances had been different, he might never have been a Grayston at all...

In a time when spelling was fluid, baby John Ascroft was baptised at All Saints Church in Wigan, on 14 September 1753. If the fact that his parents were named as William Graceson and Margery Ascroft wasn’t enough of a clue that John was the child of an unmarried couple, the extra note “base” in the register made the situation very clear.

Almost three years later, Margery Ascroft finally married William “Greason” and thereafter their four children were known by that surname. In time their eldest son John celebrated his own wedding to Ann Berry of Rainford, and seven children were born to the marriage. Although their second son, James, was baptised at Rainford on New Year’s Day 1781, he did not stay in the village.

What drew twenty-three year old James Grayston to Aughton before the spring of 1804 isn’t clear, but the church registers for St. Michael’s, Aughton indicate that the young husbandman was a resident of the parish on 13 May 1804, when he married Ann Aspinwall of Halsall parish. The ceremony was witnessed by John Grayston (probably the bridegroom’s brother) and Peter Barton (almost certainly the village school master).

So what connects James Grayston to Brook House in Aughton?

About eight years ago, I knew very little about James, but had already developed enough of an interest in my ancestry to create a very basic website. I had traced my great-grandma Esther Grayson’s line as far back as her grandfather Joseph (born in Aughton in 1823) and had yet to discover the wealth of information hidden in the local parish registers, but I had deduced that great-great-great-grandad Joseph’s surname varied . . . sometimes it was spelt Grayson, other times Grayston, but it certainly seemed to relate to the same family.

A chance e-mail revealed far more about my Grayson ancestry than I realised; across the Atlantic, a distant cousin in Maryland, America saw my webpage, got in touch and - by an even more amazing chance - planned to visit West Lancashire in mid-May 2010. Almost exactly two hundred and six years after our mutual ancestors James Grayston and Ann Aspinwall married at Aughton, we were able to meet up and look around that very church. My cousin was generous enough to share his own findings with me, and so I discovered that Joseph Grayston’s parents James and Ann had lived at Brook House, Aughton.

But where is Brook House?

When I was asked to write something about the property, I was completely baffled; it must have been in Aughton, but it wasn’t listed on either of the modern maps at home, so what had happened to it? This puzzle would turn out to take some working out.

Aughton is quite a confusing place to search on the UK census records. Having searched for evidence of the early Catholic parish in Ormskirk, I already knew that the area of Ormskirk known as “Town End” (including the site of the modern St. Anne’s Catholic Church) was classified as Aughton at least as far back as 1767, when a Return of Papists was compiled to find out exactly how many Catholics lived in each town and village; this boundary was still in place when the 1841 census was taken and there was a property close to the Catholic Church and the brewery which was identified as Brook House, Aughton. That, however, was not where my ancestor James Grayston and his family lived.

By modern reckoning, the “real” Brook House of this story is on what we now call Brookfield Lane, but yet again there was a complication because there was no road called Brookfield Lane on the 1840s Ordnance Survey map. Back then, it was known as Green Lane, and today’s Brookfield House is on the site of what was called Brook House. It was easy enough to recognise, once the right location had been found; then, as now, the Cock Beck runs along the southern edge of the property.

Keen to investigate further, I realised that a number of tithe maps had been drawn up in the 1830s and 1840s. Every road, every house, every tiny parcel of land, every body of water was carefully detailed; when I began to consult the schedule to work out exactly how much land James Grayston had occupied in 1843, I discovered that the area covered by Brook House itself was just a tiny fragment. The property was owned by “the late Roger Parker” - maybe the thirty-seven year old “Rodger Parker” who had been buried at Aughton on 29 July 1837? - but it was James Grayston who rented nineteen distinct portions of land, amounting to just over forty-eight acres, stretching from the north side of the junction of Springfield Road and Butcher’s Lane, as far east as Brookfield Lane, with another swathe forming a rough sideways T-shape from Brookfield Lane across to the Cock Beck. It seems that James Grayston did well for himself, and it is also clear that the presence of the Cock Beck provided a sort of natural boundary for the property.

Ann Grayston didn’t live to see the tithe map being drawn up; she was buried at Aughton in March 1842. James died on 15 February 1848 and was also interred at St. Michael’s Church, but - by peculiar chance - their family would have a later link to their old address.

The property was occupied by Ralph and Alice Kay in 1851, and twenty years after that it was clear that two distinct properties existed on the site - Brookfield Farm and Brookfield House. By 1881, the building had assumed another name; William Carfoot (61), a farmer of 40 acres, his children Catherine (24), Thomas (21) and James (18), and two servants were said to live at Cockbeck Farm, but a comparison of the 1840s and 1890s Ordnance Survey maps suggest that Cockbeck Farm was exactly where Brook House had been, so it may have been given an alternative name?

Brook House might not have been the only part of the local landscape to assume a new identity. In 1907, the Victoria County History of Lancashire observed that “Pudding Street is an interesting name; it has been renamed Brookfield Lane”, but the decision wasn’t recent. According to The Annals of Aughton (1893), a discussion was held during a vestry meeting on 25 March 1878, concerning the possibility of renaming Pudding Street as Brookfield Lane; it may have been a sensible choice, as references to the “Brookefield” were said to date back to 1614, and the road was never called Pudding Street on the census records. Yet that old name persisted; on the 1890s Ordnance Survey map, Pudding Street Farm is on the right side of the lane, about 100 yards from the junction with Smithy Lane.

By 1911, John and Ann Prescott lived at Brookfield House with their sons James (31), William (29) and John (20), and they employed an unmarried servant named Annie Grayson, who said she was forty-two . . . except that she probably wasn’t forty-two, and her original name wasn’t really Annie Grayson.

James and Ann Grayson, the inhabitants of Brook House in 1841, had thirteen children. Their third son Thomas (born 1809) had ten with his wife, Jane Hughes; the seventh was a boy called Peter. Born in 1845, Peter went on to marry Margaret Brookes at St. Michael’s Church, Aughton, on 12 January 1868. Just three years later, Peter and Margaret lived on Smithy Lane, with two children; their baby daughter Jane, and Margaret’s six year old daughter Ann (or Annie) Brooks, whose father was not recorded on her baptism record.

When Annie had an illegitimate daughter in 1885, the baby was baptised as Deborah Brookes, but the census records always called them Grayson, and Annie apparently adopted the name as her own. By 1911, she was employed by the Prescotts at Brookfield House, on the site where her stepfather’s own grandparents once lived.