Chesterfield family tree compiler sheds further light on Boden's fish and chip business founder

Michael Cox got in touch with the Derbyshire Times after reading our article about Boden’s which had a restaurant overlooking Low Pavements and a snack bar and chippy in the same building.

Cara Boden, whose dad Jim ran the business from 1948/9 to the Eighties after taking it over from his father, shared an insight into how Boden’s began.

She credited her great-grandmother Adelaide with founding the business, which began as one shop on or near Saltergate, then became two shops at Sheffield Road and Occupation Road before moving into the town centre.

Cara believed that Adelaide was a widow when she emigrated from Germany in the mid to late 1800s.

However during research into his family tree, Michael Cox discovered that it was Adelaide’s father who came from Germany as part of a state-supported emigration scheme following the Baden Revolution of 1848 when there was a peasant revolt.

Adelaide’s father was called Johann Heinrich Grandt who arrived in Derby at the age of 18 in 1850, adopted the anglicised name of John Henry Grant and ran a pork butcher’s shop in the city. John married Martha Thompson from Youlgreave and they had one son and four daughters including Adelaide who was the youngest and Laura Eliza who was Michael Cox’s great-grandmother. One of their daughters, Rosetta, was just a year old when she died.

Michael said: “By 1891 they’d moved to 17 Wharf Lane in Chesterfield, with butchers shop at the side of the canal basin. The basin was filled in for building of the Great Central Railway, so John moved to 23 Sunny Springs. By 1911 John was living with his son at the Peacock Inn, Cutthorpe, where his son was publican and ex-bare knuckle fighter. John died in 1912 and resides in an unmarked grave in Spital cemetery.”

Laura Eliza married John Thomas Holehouse in 1883 and had two children, Arthur and Lily. Her husband John, who was a grocer, died skating on Walton Dam in 1890. Laura Eliza later married Henry Pike and she owned a tobacconist shop opposite the Vic verandah in Chesterfield until her death around 1941.

Michael met his great-aunt Adelaide’s daughters, Minnie and Ida, in the early 1950s when they came to visit his grandad Arthur. He said: “They were very old, white shoulder length hair, dressed in black with sparkling black Whitby jet beads. I think they’d been to a family funeral. They were very Victorian in attitude. My grandfather introduced my mother and I; my mother was ignored and their response to me was ‘little children should be seen and not heard’ then they disappeared into the parlour.”