This family is scattered across various Todmorden graveyards, but these three are together in the same grave. There’s even a tantalising gap between names, one of our favourite gravestone mysteries. Who were the Barkers?
Robert Barker was born in Walsden in 1788, five years before his future wife Martha Jackson. We know little about her because she died before the 1841 Census could be taken, but we know that she died of consumption, and before then we can also see that she spent an awful lot of time pregnant. Robert and Martha got married in 1811 and they had twelve children together over the following 27 years at their home at Thornsgreece. Poor Martha! She died in August 1839 from consumption, a few months after the birth of their final child Ann.
Robert and Martha lost their first son named Robert in 1814 when he was, as the burial register puts it, 3/4 year old, and 1839 would also see the death of their firstborn Mary. Robert Jr. the first, Mary and Martha are all buried at St. Mary’s. When their daughter Grace died in 1849 she was also buried there. Christ Church was bought for a reason in the first place though and that was because grave space was fast running out at St. Mary’s, so it’s no surprise that the family started thinking of a plan B.
Robert was a power loom weaver but as time went on he ended up working as a general labourer. By Martha’s death four of the remaining children had already moved out because of that big age gap, and as little Ann and her next two older siblings Matilda and John grew up there was less need for the grown female siblings in particular to stay behind to help watch her. Robert never remarried so this burden would have fallen onto them, and it seems as though the siblings all stayed connected over the course of their lives as a result.
By 1851 Robert was left with Olive, Harriet, John, Matilda and Ann, and by 1861 he was down to just Harriet and Ann. Harriet was the ninth of the twelve children and in 1859 she had married Thomas Greenwood of Shade, a throstle overlooker. The couple had a daughter named Alice Ann in 1860 but she died a year later and was buried somewhere at Christ Church. Thomas died the following year and was buried at Cross Stone; why, when Alice Ann was here? Good question! Also, where is “here”? In this grave, in another? Why would it be another? Why not…this grave is very far over to be an 1861 grave. It begs the question of who else is actually in here, namely, the first person supposedly into this grave: Robert. Robert died in 1864, the same year that Harriet gave birth to an illegitimate daughter named Matilda, and he is also buried at Christ Church (and maybe even here).
Ann had never married and now she and Harriet clung to each other, staying in the house at Swineshead Clough with little Matilda. They stayed this way for a while but in 1879 Harriet died, and Matilda for her own reasons went off to live with her grandmother Greenwood at Shade. Ann was now an unmarried spinster whose only money was what she could earn as a weaver, so she went to go live with her sister Matilda (now Stott) and her husband and family in Newchurch. By 1891 she was back in Todmorden and staying with her widowed sister Olive (now Kershaw) and her sons. Ann and Olive were at Honey Hole first but soon moved back to Swineshead, but when Olive died in 1900 Ann was at a loose end once more. She ended up living with John Stott – any relation to Matilda’s husband? – as his housemaid at his farm in Littleborough just along from the Beach Hotel. Hard work for a woman at her age, but lovely views out the window…
Ann’s health began to suffer though and soon she was back at Swineshead, and in 1903 she died and was buried here with…well…Harriet for sure, and maybe their father? Maybe Harriet’s daughter? The grid is foolproof until it isn’t and with there being so many Barkers we can never be fully sure who might also be in this grave, or who was in here first. Meanwhile we know these collection of siblings are scattered off to Walsden, and maybe some have even ended up at nonconformist yards elsewhere in Todmorden given their Inchfield roots. Anything is possible. As for who the tantalising gap after Robert’s name was meant for…well, that WILL remain a mystery unless a family member has any information.