The part played by Beckitt and Eliza Nicholson, related to the Cadmans by marriage, and later by their daughter, Teresa Mary le Boulanger, is more overt: we still possess letters written by Beckitt Nicholson to Father Locke and to the Bishop of Beverley, and the names of all three occur with some frequency in the parish Liber Baptizatorum and Liber Confirmatorum as godparents and as sponsors. The letters, written between October and November 1875, are entirely concerned with pecuniary and legal matters and whilst they do not give particulars of the location of the building work to be financed, the dates, content and recipients of the letters, certainly suggest Wath-upon-Dearne. The entire collection of letters was written by Beckitt Nicholson in his professional capacity as a solicitor, but are at the same time, by his own admission, inseparable from his personal commitment to Father Locke and his work.

The excessive attention to mundane matters of finance that permeates the extant documents connected with the parish at this time, is indicative of both the difficulties  and the tensions generated by those difficulties, during the formative years of the parish. The personal strain felt by Father Locke in serving a parish of over three hundred souls, the majority of whom resided some miles away in Mexborough and Denaby, with only meagre resources available, is painfully underlined by his unexpectedly pessimistic outburst in a letter, lamenting the Bishop's apparent lack of confidence in his work and by the curt and sometimes enigmatic comments set down in his Visitation Papers.

Father Locke^'s description of his visit, in 1880, to the outer reaches of the missions as "unsatisfactory", and the short note written on the back of an empty return for expenditure on schools attached to the mission, reporting "No school - one much needed - no means to build", are in sharp contrast to the situation only forty years on. Father W.E. Morrissy, third priest of the mission, could write in response to the question of whether or not there were any particular problems connected with the care of souls, that there were none. He could also present, in detail, a picture of solvency and of a flourishing Day School available for the instruction of the Catholic children.

The work of Father Locke, continued in the early part of the century by Father Daniel Murphy, and later with fortitude and devotion by the Sisters of Mercy, bore a lasting fruit. It is today that we modestly lay some claim to a share in that fruit, as we see in the lovely church of St. Joseph^'s, the labours of religious and lay persons of Wath-upon-Dearne, and as we commemorate in prayer and praise the triumphs, as well as the troubles, of our Catholic forefathers.