Have you ever known someone who had the same name as you, who you wish didn’t? Samuel here did.
Samuel Stell, one of several Stells of Todmorden, was born in 1831 in Shade. He was the youngest son of his parents, Sam and Mary (Ingham) Stell. Mary was Sam’s second wife, so Samuel had quite a few older half siblings as well as an older full sibling, his sister Elisabeth. Sam was unlucky…or rather his wives were the unlucky ones…and within a few years of his birth Mary Stell had died. Samuel was raised by his father and older siblings. The 1841 Census shows Sam, a mechanic, living at Shade with his older son George as well as Elizabeth and Samuel, and with his daughter Isabella and her husband George Fielden and their daughter Zipporah next door
Samuel also became a mechanic. Sam Stell died in 1851 and four years later Samuel got married to Jane Crossley. Jane was a year younger than Samuel and the two shared one childhood experience in particular: the loss of a mother. Mary (Rawson) Crossley had died two years after Jane’s birth and her father Edward, a sawyer, never remarried. The Crossleys lived in a large extended family unit at Bank Top, with one house containing Edward’s father and siblings, and the other Edward and his four children. After William’s death Edward and his sister Susan moved in together. Jane was able to have the benefit of all those aunts and uncles, just as Samuel had.
A note on reusing family names…it’s nice when people name their children after beloved parents or aunts or uncles or siblings, but it makes our lives hard sometimes. Not so much in this story, but in others it has, and in real life it can really be awkward. Our Samuel will have experienced this. He and Jane and their family were Shade stalwarts, with baptisms happening at Knowlwood and the furthest into Todmorden they ever went being to Christ Church for other baptisms or funerals. But another Samuel Stell lived at Meadow Bottom and was always getting into trouble – drunkenness, threats, violence – maybe that’s why our Samuel never went into Tod! Our Samuel never said boo to a goose, or if he did he was much more discreet about it.
Samuel and Jane had eight children altogether, starting with Mary in 1855 and ending with Isabella in 1871. They had their losses; Edward in 1864 and William in 1866, both less than a year old, and both buried in Christ Church but conspicuously absent from this stone. Only little Isabella, named for Samuel’s helpful sister (who was herself named for her grandmother), who also died less than a year old in 1871. But as we can tell from the out of sequence dates on this stone it was placed at a later date, and whoever did the placing might not have remembered the two boys.
The Stells, as we mentioned, seem to have floated between Knowlwood Primitive Methodist and Christ Church for baptisms, but this might have been for convenience – burials were cheaper if you were baptised here. It’s noticeable that it was after Edward and William died that the change in baptism location occurred. The Stells themselves remained in Shade though, eventually moving from their back-to-back at Waterloo to 22 Bar Street. The Stell children all became cotton weavers apart from George who was a mechanic’s apprentice. This included Joe, who was Joseph on the census returns but who went by Joe in day to day life because…you guessed it…he didn’t want to get confused with Joseph Stell of Meadow Bottom who was best known for being very publicly alienated from his wife. Our Joe was a calmer personality who would later end up following Samuel into the mechanical trade, becoming a mechanical engine driver (in a mill, not a train). In 1888 he married Jane Barnes, a native of Hull who had come to Todmorden at some point and was a few years older than him. They settled in at Cowfold Street in the town centre to start a family, although for unknown reasons this never came to be.
Meanwhile Samuel continued to work and also briefly became a prominent member of the Waterside Fire Brigade. He died in 1893 and was buried here with Isabella. Jane was supported by her children, Betsy in particular, and so did not have to worry about what happened next straight away. For a few years life carried on but in 1900 both she and her daughter in law Jane suffered a shock when Joe was one of the unlucky few to fall victim to a typhoid outbreak.
The younger Jane Stell went back to work as a cotton weaver and mourned her loss, while the older Jane Stell leaned on Betsy even further. Both households were near each other on Hollins Road so the support was able to continue that way. The younger Jane remarried in 1904 though and went on with her life. Her former mother in law held on for a few more years but in 1907 she joined her husband and two (maybe four) children here in this grave.