BRITAIN might not have been a nation of shopkeepers, as Napoleon is supposed to have sneeringly suggested, but it was not short of hard-working small businessmen.

This week we pull on two very different family threads to arrive at the door of two sisters whose passion for digging up genealogical evidence is unrivalled.

The sisters are Patricia Howarth and Valerie Bolt.

We’ll start with Joseph Hopson Powney, the sisters’ great grandfather, whose shop front was featured in the All Our Yesterdays pages of April 6.

Joseph founded a bespoke tailors business in John Street, Huddersfield, which was roughly where Buxton House flats are now.

His family came to Huddersfield from Staffordshire, via Wakefield, in the middle of the 19th century.

The Wakefield connection is a little vague, but it’s thought that Joseph’s father, George, was originally a brick-maker who met and married a Wakefield woman who worked at a hospital.

At some stage George became head gardener to James Sykes, businessman and benefactor, who financed the building of Lindley clock tower. George’s brother, George Henry, was also a gardener.

George’s son, Joseph, born 1879, had different and higher ideas, swapping horticulture for haute couture.

He trained on Savile Row and attended Queen Victoria’s funeral where, one could speculate, he made careful notes on funeral garb.

He took tailoring very seriously, making a point of attending the early Parish fashion shows and bringing designs home for his wife Emma (nee Garside).