AN author who lives in Astley Bridge has penned a book about his family history.

Tony Pearson, born in Leigh in 1946, has published The Pearsons of Tyldesley: a Northern Heritage of Cotton and Coal.

The grandfather held a book launch and family reunion at St Richards function room, Mayfield Street, Atherton, on Saturday.

Retired University of Glasgow academic Mr Pearson, who was brought up in Astley and Tyldesley, said: "I started it in 1995, just doing the research, never dreaming what I would do with it.

"Now we have got programmes on television like Who Do You Think You Are?

"I started it long before any of that.

"I retired in 2001 and I had a lot more time to be able to devote to it.

"I delved deeper into it and thought, I have got enough information to make it into a book."

The result is a 300-page, hardback book, of which he paid to have 50 copies privately printed.

Mr Pearson distributed them to family members, including his uncle George, aged 98, former headmaster of Tyldesley Mission School and well-known teacher at St George’s Tyldesley.

The book tells the history of a prominent family living around the then Lancashire town of Tyldesley from the 1880s, to the present day.

Charting the family’s migration from roots in 18th-century Derbyshire and Staffordshire, it details how Pearson ancestors came to settle in Tyldesley and traces collateral family connections.

More than just a family tree, it focuses on the wider social, economic and political currents influencing genealogy since the Industrial Revolution.

It tells a story of ordinary working lives shaped by the coal and cotton industries, once such monolithic features of Northern England’s industrial landscape.