Charles and Sally have many children and grandchildren buried at Christ Church, and if we tried to link them all in we’d get very tired. But a good place to start to catch a little of their story is to read about the children we’ve written the stories up for so far: Richard, Hannah, Henry, and Lucy. What’s missing though?
There’s not a lot missing that we can actually figure out, frustratingly. Some of that is because of the common surnames, some of that is because of the time. Thanks to the older style of marriages being registered by the parish in the form of banns, we don’t have father’s names for either Charles or Sally. Various family trees assign John and Mary (Rigg) Stansfield as Charles’s parents and this would make sense as John worked for the Howard family at Moorhey, which is very close to where Charles would farm himself and is also where he eventually died. Those same trees identify Sally’s parents as John and Sarah (Stansfield) Ratcliffe, making her the sister of Peter Thomas Ratcliff(e) which also makes sense as the Ratcliffes farmed at Woodfield which was not far from Moorhey. These Bacup Road farming families stuck together…
Anyway, Charles and Sally were roughly the same age, Sally a few months the elder, and their marriage in 1833 was the start of a large family. Not just the four children above, but plenty of others; Mary, their first, came along in 1834, followed by Sarah in 1835, John in 1836, then Richard, Lucy and Henry, then James in 1849, and Hannah to round off the births in 1851. For much of this time the Stansfields were marked as resident at “Sower Hall” (Sourhall) on baptism registers although the Census puts them at Reddishaw in 1841 and Stones Grange in 1851. Charles was named as a labourer.
Mary, the eldest, was living at home in 1851 and was not working, despite younger siblings having occupations. She may have been staying home to help with her new baby sister and other younger relatives. Brother John wasn’t one of them, as in 1851 he was living with his paternal grandfather John Stansfield and uncle Edward and aunt Susan at “Stones Moorhey”. Grandfather John was employing three men to help him farm 58 acres. Was young John one of them? We aren’t sure – his occupation is given as “errand boy”!
It was during this decade where the first loss would hit this family. Mary died right at the end of October 1859 at the age of 25. That assumption that she was staying home to help with the younger children was just that, an assumption. Her death registration reveals the truth: she had epilepsy from infancy and it seems more likely now that she was unable to work, rather than working only in the home.
By 1861 the family were living at Pexwood and Charles was a plate layer on the railway. Maybe this was a favour called in by Sally’s brother Peter, who at this point was the station inspector and was a rising star locally. Young John had moved back home with his parents and was also employed on the railway, as a porter. Another favour? This decade brought another death, this time young John himself. He died in March 1868 aged 31, from an unexplained anasarca (aka generalised edema, aka fluid buildup in multiple parts of the body leading to organ failure).
Having lost two adult children, Charles and Sally continued on, because what were their other choices? Charles had left plate laying and gone back to farming, presumably after the death of his father, and what was left of the unmarried female family as well as at least one married son were now up at Moorhey, farming 50 acres between them all. Charles might have been a temporary railway worker but he was a farmer at heart, and found himself doing well as a tenant farmer. By 1881 the 50 acres he had responsibility for and an income from had grown to 120 and the three employees had grown to eight. By now only their last unmarried daughter, Sarah, was living at home, and working as a general servant. Whether this was for them or for someone else is unclear.
Charles died in March 1882. Richard took over, and if you didn’t read his story already then go back and read it now to find out what all of Charles’s hard work came to in the end. Sarah married one of Charles’s farm labourers named John Stansfield (no relation) in 1883, and Sally went to go live with her widowed daughter Lucy and her children at their home on Friths Terrace, down off the tops and into the valley bottom. She died there in July 1890.
That just leaves two Stansfield children left to tell the stories of – Sarah and James. James and family are at 34.24, and Sarah might be buried at Shore but due to the limited information available about burials there we can’t be sure that the one we found is her. We’ll find her though. We always find them in the end!