38.3 – Winifred Hogan

Winifred looks to be lying here alone, but we think she might have some family with her – some small comfort (hopefully) for a woman who died young.

Winifred’s story begins with that of her parents, William Hogan and Margaret O’Donohoe. William and Margaret were both Irish immigrants who married in Shrewsbury in 1852. William worked as a general labourer and liked a drink, or two, and travelled for work. Margaret was left holding the baby…all the babies…all eight of them. Winifred, born in 1860, was the fourth child and third daughter.

William’s problems got the better of him and in 1870 he died. Margaret stayed home to look after the younger children, the youngest being less than a year old, and the older children pitched in as best they could to bring in money. Eldest daughter Ann was nowhere to be found (we think she might have spent a spell in a lunatic asylum but can’t be certain) but son William was a bricklayer’s apprentice, and Mary (12), Winifred (10) and John (8) were all factory operatives. What brought the Hogans to Todmorden eventually is unknown; Ann married in Birkenhead in 1876 and William in 1881 was in Kent at a military engineering school, and everyone else was unmarried. A sibling, perhaps? Word sent back from another Shropshire lad or lass who came to Todmorden? There were more than you’d think. At current count we have 465 researched graves and nine of them also involve Shropshire natives who came here, which is a small number, but still noteworthy when you think of all the other places where people started out.

In 1881 the Hogans were living on the now more or less vanished Albert Street in the town centre, and Winifred was working as a cotton slubbing frame tenter. Later that year Mary got married to William Butterworth of 21.34 and settled over towards Roomfield Lane, aka Halifax Road, and it looks as though William and Winifred moved that direction as well, and possibly took up work at Croft, or Hope, or Albion Mill, or indeed any of the many other mills there. It was probably Croft Mill though as she and William took up residence at 5 Croft Bank (within the yellow circle on the map below) which bounded onto the small mill building.

In August 1886 Winifred came down with bronchitis which aggravated a longstanding but presumably previously quite mild heart problem. It turned out that her problem was more serious than anyone thought, and she died in late September from heart disease, “duration indefinite”, at the age of 26.

Our story doesn’t end here because rarely does it end with the first death, or the only name on a stone. What happened to the other Hogans? They married or moved on, but brother William and mother Margaret stayed. William sadly inherited some of his father’s alcohol problems along with his name, and was in and out of magistrates court on a regular basis. He, Margaret and the other siblings moved to Lineholme Terrace (now Holme Street) in Lydgate and stayed there for a while, but as time passed both of them became unwell for their own reasons. William continued with his bad habits and ended up at Sparks’s lodging house at Knowlwood and Margaret moved in with Mary and William Butterworth on Meadow Street. In January 1904 Margaret died, and the following month William died too. Both are buried at Christ Church and in the absence of any other Hogan graves, is it a stretch to say they might be in here?

Also, young siblings who die often live on in their nieces and nephews, so you won’t be surprised to know that a young girl named Winifred Butterworth also lived at Meadow Street…