A short story about a grave that ended a family line.
Abraham Hollinrake was, according to all the family trees on Ancestry, born in 1808 to Abraham and Mary (Heap) Hollinrake of Heptonstall. However, the Abraham buried here has an age on all other public records that tallies with a birth in 1810; and so we suspect there’s a chance he’s actually the son of Grace Hollinrake, an unmarried woman from New Shop in Stansfield – much closer to Todmorden – with his supposed father being a George Hirst from Todmorden. Grace Hollinrake died three years later at the age of 29 so what that meant for that Abraham is unknown.
In 1836 he married Mary Greenwood of Langfield, having moved there and become a carder. Mary was seven years his senior and worked as a bobbin winder in a cotton mill. A detailed search of the GRO and baptism records seem to show that the couple only had a single child, their daughter Grace who arrived in September 1844 when Abraham was 34 and Mary was 41. She was baptised at Cross Stone. Abraham was by this point a “shop keeper” although whether this meant he was a grocer or was in some position looking after a “shop” (workplace, or warehouse?) isn’t clear. The family lived at Lee and stayed there for a long time until moving down to Todmorden, to Peel Street at Cobden, sometime after the 1851 Census.
In 1859 Grace died from phthsis which would have come as a huge blow to the Hollinrakes. She had been working as a power loom weaver so brought money into the home, but also, for reasons unknown she was also in possession of some money of her own. Was this a bequest from an older relative? It took five years for probate to be settled but beyond even that little interesting tidbit, this is still something else because it’s the first time we’ve come across a minor who had an estate that needed settling at all.
This mystery aside, what happened next? It’s hard to be sure because there was a surprising number of Abraham Hollinrakes knocking around, but it seems that he and Mary eventually moved to Lydgate, where they lodged with a James Greenwood (a relative of Mary’s?) and where Abraham got into a few bad habits – tactfully not explained in the local papers but described elsewhere as drinking and gambling. Is that where Grace’s money estate went? You’d hope not.
His dreams of running a pub in tatters, Abraham instead became a confectioner, and carried this on until his death in 1884. Mary predeceased him in 1878. They no doubt had many more stories to be told but none of them were preserved anywhere, so we have to leave things there – two elderly parents who moved on as best they could and were eventually reunited with their beloved only child.