Francis H Moore and Phoebe Blinhorn Moore: Vitals

Phoebe Blinkhorn Birth Certificate





Francis Moore and Phoebe Blinkhorn Marriage Registration




Francis H Moore Birth registration

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

Francis H Moore: My Grandfather

Francis H Moore: Picture From Citizenship Document


I never knew my grandfather. He died before I was born. This has been a big regret in my life. From what I know of him, he could have been a good role model for me and my brother.

What I know of him came mainly though his letters to friends and family in Sydney Mines and Wigan. He always typed a carbon copy of these letters and kept them. After he died these letters fell into the hands of my uncle Francis aka “Harry.” I received a bound copy of these letters held by uncle for a Christmas present. Almost all that I know about him came from those letters.

From these letters I discovered he did not live in Wigan like I thought. He lived in Aspull/Haigh. Aspull and the neighboring Haigh are about 3 to 4 miles northeast of the much larger city of Wigan in Lancashire, England. From Aspull to the Blackrod, the home of Richard Moore is about more 2 miles further up the road. That makes Blackrod about 4 to 5 miles from Wigan.

From what I can tell from the letters he was a very intelligent man even though he ended his education at the eighth grade to work in the mines. He wrote short stories. He learned Spanish. He would write radio quiz shows and offer his questions on history and literature. He was knowledgeable on current events and had a definite opinion on the labor movement and what was going on in Europe with Hitler. In all his letters I never have come across a spelling or typing error.
Francis Henry Moore was born in Aspull in to Constantine and Mary Watmough Moore who lived at 31 Church Street on 23 Nov 1880. He attended Mass and school at the Our Lady’s Roman Catholic Church. By 1897 he is already working at the Wigan Iron and Coal Company. He is just 16 or 17 years old. On 25 Oct 1905 he married Phoebe Blinkhorn at St Williams Church in Ince where Phoebe lived. (Ince is about a mile from Aspull.) In April 1907 Francis Moore leaves England and immigrates to Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia, Canada. His ship was the Tunisia. In Sydney Mines he worked on the railroad that serviced the coal mines. He was fireman. He joined the union and remained a member pretty much the rest of his life. In 24 Jun 1923 he left Canada and immigrated to Whittier, CA with his brother Wilfred. They came to Whittier to work in the nearby Santa Fe Springs oil field. Phoebe and the children would join him in Feb 1924. He built the family home on Hoover Street with Phoebe after 1930. He became a citizen of the USA but always had a love of England until the day he died. He was transferred to the Taft Oil fields about 120 north of Los Angeles. There, in the spring of 1940, he contracted pneumonia. He died in the bathroom of his house on Hoover. He and Phoebe had four children. Wilfred was born in Wigan born on 8 Nov 1906. Francis Henry “Harry” was born on 12 Sep 1908. Florence Gertrude “Florie” was born on 29 Nov 1910. My father, Frederick Vincent “Freddy”, was born on 29 Dec 1916. All three of the younger children were born in Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia, Canada.

That is my grandfather in a nutshell. In future posts, I will list a detail time line with sources for Francis Moore for those genealogists and others that are interested.

Copyright 2011 Paul Moore