The story of the Barnes family of Sheffield is really one that mirrors the industrialisation of the city in the nineteenth century.
This story traces the line of James Parker Barnes and the fortunes that were made and broken in Victorian Sheffield.
His maternal grandfather, James Parker, a weavers son from Bridgeton, Glasgow, founded a family firm of builders merchants in Sheffield in 1853 that survived for over a hundred years, helping to support the building boom of the late nineteenth century.
His grandmother, Elizabeth Barnes, work-house inmate and only daughter of a tenant farmer in Bolsterstone, Sheffield, mothered Thomas Hammerton Barnes, whose meteoric rise and tragic fall in Sheffield industrial, political, religious and social circles typifies the ‘clogs to clogs in one generation‘ fate that befell many early industrialists.
This is a story of the painful contrasts that Victorian Sheffield offered those who lived and worked in the city and its surrounding villages.
All pages which follow are mainly the work of my first cousin once removed, David Tonks. He sadly passed away this year, 2025, and these pages are dedicated to his memory.