The final Anderton family grave here at Christ Church contains the second of John and Theodora’s four sons and members of his family – George Lloyd Anderton, his wife Jinefer, and three of their children.
George owes his middle name to his step-grandfather; it was clearly a nod to him, and a sign that Theodora had a good relationship with the man her mother married after her father died. It’s worth mentioning because we know that doesn’t always happen!
George became an iron worker and in 1890 married the impressively named Jinefer Hetty Littleton Williams of Royd. Jinefer was born in 1868 in St Winnow, near Lostwithiel, Cornwall. Her name as registered officially was Jenifer Etta L. Williams, and it is spelled variously as Jenifer, Jinefer, Jenefer…any and all combinations. We’ll hope here that, unlike Bessie, the spelling on her stone and her marriage certificate is the correct one.
Jinefer’s father John was a railway worker and she was the youngest of six children born to him and his wife Mary Ann (Littleton) Williams. In 1871 the family were still in Cornwall, but by 1881 they had relocated to King Street in Mytholm, just on the edge of Hebden Bridge centre, and John was working as a stone mason. Jinefer was a half-timer at that point, working in a cotton mill’s card room as well as going to school.
Just before her marriage to George, the Williams family had relocated to Todmorden, and there they stayed. John died in 1905 and Mary Ann in 1914, and they’re buried at Christ Church at 15.11.
George and Jinefer went first to 6 Boardman Street, then briefly over to Wood Street in Lydgate with his brother John and family before heading back to Boardman Street again, where they would live until sometime before 1911. They had an impressive nine children, six of whom survived as far as 1911 as recorded on the census. Their second child and first son, John, is buried here – he was born at the start of 1892 and died 9 months later in September.
George was active in various local organisations, from what we can see on the British Newspaper Archive. The Templars, the parish church, maybe even cricket (there are more Andertons around than you’d think, and when the news only gives their first initial, you have to be pretty sure…), George was involved. As for Jinefer? Likewise, when all you get is “Mrs. Anderton”, and there’s a few about, you can’t really say for certain. She may have been involved in the parish church. The family were all hard workers, and stuck together to save their money. In 1911 they had relocated to Woodhouse Road, where in a 5 room house both George and Jinefer, all six of their children (aged 20 to 2), a son-in-law, and a grandchild, somehow all lived. It can’t have been comfortable, but it was economical. Tax valuation records show that George was working for the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway in 1910.
Stephen, the first son of theirs to reach adulthood, was 15 in 1911 and working as a doffer. Later he became an insurance agent and in 1921 he married Jane Ellen Greenwood in Shaw, near Rochdale, which makes sense as the family seems at some point to have left Todmorden and gone in that direction. His death was unremarkable as it passed without mention in any newspapers or other official records beyond his death registration and burial at Christ Church.
Bertha, their second daughter, was a cotton spinner in 1911. Something sad happened to Bertha at some point, because in 1939 she was living with George and Jinefer at Turf Hill Road in Rochdale and is described as “incapacitated (invalid)” on the Register. She died in February 1951. We sadly don’t know what happened as her death also went unmentioned in the newspapers.
Bertha outlived her father. George died in 1943 and even though the family had moved away, was brought back to be buried alongside baby John and adult son Stephen.
Jinefer was the final one into this plot, in 1952, at the very respectable age of 84.