I have memories as a young child in the back of the family car, bored out of my head as my parents drive around the streets of Manchester, having taken the opportunity to reminisce during a trip up north for a some other event.

There have been many times during the last 20 years as a genealogist, that I have wished I had started my family history journey earlier, been more interested back then, so I could have captured information now lost. The city of Manchester is seemingly unrecognisable to those who grew up there in the forties and fifties. The regeneration of large areas have completely transformed it and as a result a significant number of the streets and neighbourhoods that even my mother grew up in, are now long gone. For me to then imagine what those same areas would have looked like in the early 1900s, when…