My Grandmother: Phoebe Blinkhorn Moore

Phoebe Blinkhorn Moore in Front of the Hoover House

My grandmother was Phoebe Blinkhorn Moore. I do remember her in that I was a teenager when she died.

My father was very close to his mother. Every Sunday around 4:00 pm he would take me and my brother to visit her in the house that she built on Hoover Ave. in Whittier, CA. This became a ritual in my youth. Sometime I would walk home after school. I would pass her house a stop in to say hello. I remember spending a lot afternoons at her house, perhaps she was babysitting me. I can’t remember why I would be there so often. We would spend every Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter with her and my uncle Harry and his wife. Most of these holidays were spent at her house. Sometime she would visit us. She liked to cook. She was a huge fan of Liberace.

Phoebe Blinkhorn was born in the village of Ince near Wigan and Aspull on 16 Oct 1882. Her family must have been very poor. I had heard a family story that at one time Phoebe was a pit brow lassie. She told me once that she ran a pub in Blackpool. I have not been able to prove either story, but I believe both of them to be true.

I have been able to find Phoebe in all the censuses from her birth up to 1930 except for one. She is not on the 1901 census. Yet, two years later when she was married she was living with her parents in Ince. Perhaps they forgot to list her as living at home. Perhaps at 19 she went off and ran a pub in Blackpool. I don’t know where she was in 1901. I have been working on this problem for over a decade. I doubt I will ever find her in 1901.

She married Francis Moore on 25 Oct 1905 in a Roman Catholic Church. According to Harry’s wife that knew her, she had to convert from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism in order to marry Francis whose was family were devout Catholics.

She would follow her husband to Canada sometime between 1907 and 1908. (Uncle Harry was born in Canada in Sept of 1908.) She would again follow her husband to Whittier California in 1924. (She told me she took the train across the United States and was terrified about being attacked by Indians.)

When she came to Whittier the family lived in small houses for 6 years or so. All the while she was saving up money to build a house modeled on houses she had seen in England. She had a jar (cookie?) where the boys would put part of the wages every week. That is what she used to build the house on Hoover Avenue. My daughter and I own that house to this day. My daughter and her family live there.

She lived in that house with my Uncle Harry and his wife until 1963. That is the year my parents bought the house and moved in. We lived with my grandmother for a couple of months. Then she died on 23 Sep 1963. She is buried in a Catholic cemetery with her husband and later my Uncle Harry.

My biggest regret with my grandmother was that I was too young to ask about her life. Now I would like to know how she lived before getting married and moving to Canada.

There are still a number of her family members, namely the Blinkhorns’, that live in England and Canada.

I will post the time line for both her and Francis on the next blog. In future blogs I will work backward in time from Phoebe into the 1700’s with her Blinkhorn family.


Copyright 2001 Paul Moore