The Haighs left Todmorden for the distant wilds of Lightcliffe, but left three…yes, three, of their children behind.
Reuben Haigh was born in 1817, the illegitimate son of Samuel Ogden and Eleanor Haigh. There are a lot of well-known Reuben Haighs in Todmorden but this one was neither a farmer nor a weaver nor a coal miner, and he wasn’t even an Inchfield lad – this one was born at Friths on Bacup Road and grew up at Watty. His parent didn’t marry in the end and in 1823 Eleanor married weaver William Greenwood and started a fresh family with him. Reuben wasn’t estranged from the Ogdens though…it would be hard in those days, because everyone worked in the same places and knew each other. There was definitely a lot to be said for maintaining cordial relations!
By 1841 Reuben’s mother Eleanor had died – she is buried at Christ Church, as is his half-sister Mary Greenwood who died in 1827 – and he was working as a picker maker and living with his youngest sister Ruth at Watty Hole, in the home of Joseph Ogden. An uncle? The following year he married Sarah Horsfall of Smithy Holme. That cordial relationship with his father Samuel might have broken down, since he left the “father’s information” field blank.
Sarah was a cotton winder, also a half-orphan; her mother Esther had died a few years after Eleanor Haigh, and in 1841 she was living with her father James, grandmother Sally, and five siblings. The loss of their mothers had hit Reuben and Sarah equally, and so when their first child was born in 1843, they named the little girl Eleanor. Their next daughter, born in 1850, would be named Esther Ann. Two sons came between those girls – John in 1845 and James Frederick in 1847 – and five more would come afterwards. Nine children! Not shabby. But not all those children thrived.
Little John Haigh died in 1846 and was buried here, and in 1850 little Eleanor died and was buried with him. 1850 was a bad year indeed for the Haighs because Esther Ann also died that year, in December, only eight months old. She’s buried at Christ Church but curiously isn’t on this stone. Is she with her grandmother? If so, why?
Some of those later children predeceased their parents, but they and Reuben and Sarah were all buried at Stoney Royd in Halifax. Reuben had taking his picker making to Halifax and made a good living and name for himself, living in a nice house on Winding Road (now long gone) and then later 7 Westfield in Lightcliffe, where he died in 1876. The Haighs had not, in fact, lived in Todmorden since some time after Eleanor’s baptism in 1843. By the time of John’s birth in 1845 they had moved away. Their ties were strong at first but James Frederick and Esther Ann, the third and fourth children, were the last two baptised at Christ Church and them at the same time, as if it were an afterthought. Subsequent children seem to have had to baptise themselves when they felt like it. Those ties to their old home faded and so one of them never got round to adding Esther Ann’s name to this stone…it’s up to anyone who visits now to remember her name and that she is there.
