The Romans built a fort at the confluence of the rivers Irwell and Medlock in north-west England in AD 79, and named it Mancunium. By the Middle Ages Mamecester, as it had become known, was a manorial township, but in the late 18th and 19th centuries its booming textile industry saw the settlement, now Manchester, grow at astonishing speed. The new city, nicknamed ‘Cottonopolis’, was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, its population rising from about 10,000 in 1717 to 1,313,550 in 1861.
Hailing from Salford, a neighbouring city swallowed up by Manchester’s sprawl, WDYTYA? Magazine reader Janet Skirrow assumed that her family had always come from the area – until she began unpicking her genealogy. Her forebears had travelled great distances and suffered hardships to make Manchester their…
