This grave holds a mother, two of her children, a grandson and a daughter in law; their story starts in Leeds, but also, in France!
Mercy’s story comes first, and it’s not an uncommon story for the time. Mercy Smith was born in Wetherby in 1813 and at some point moved to Bramley with her parents. There she met a dashing Frenchman…no, we aren’t joking!…by the name of Arsène Voltaire Potentier. Arsène was a dyer who had only come to England the year before, travelling from Bolougne to London along with a woman named Anna Billet. If Anna was his fiancee then it was bad news for her as once he made it to Leeds he only had eyes for Mercy. The couple married, settled at the now-demolishe Poland Lane in Bramley, and had three children: Mary, Arsène Voltaire, and Alfred. Alfred’s birth in 1846 however would have been a mixed event for Mercy, as that same year Arsène Sr. decided that married life in Britain was not for him, and he sailed for New Orleans all on his own. That’s the end of his involvement in this story. Naughty boy.
Mercy decided to leave Bramley and for reasons entirely unknown to us made her way down to Todmorden and Pexwood specifically. This movement may have started right before Alfred’s birth as he was born in Bradford, not Leeds. Once Mercy settled here she seems to have either been very personable, or had very bad luck, it isn’t very clear; but she had two more children out of wedlock, Emma in 1847 and John Henry in 1853. Mercy wasn’t very good with paperwork and Emma’s birth appears to be unregistered with the GRO, and John Henry is registered as only “Henry Potentier”. Mercy was uneducated, like many working class women of the time, and abandonment plus many children meant that she had to find work where she could. On the 1851 Census her occupation is given as “charwoman” and both Mary and Arsène Jr. (who now was going by Voltaire, and would later – like many children with complicated names they didn’t ask for – anglicise it further to Walter) were at work as throstle piecers despite only being eleven and nine years old respectively.
Things did not improve much as the US Civil War swung into action in the 1860s. Some things had changed; Mary had met James Turner, a local tinplate worker, and they had two sons named Fred and Young before marrying in 1860. On the 1861 Census they were living next door to Mercy and her other children (and wrongly named as all Potentiers, when only Fred and Young held the surname). Mercy was working as a housekeeper and the others were all working in cotton spinning apart from John Henry who was still at school. By 1864 things had gotten even harder and Mercy was in receipt of poor relief due to lack of work. Alfred had gone off to Leeds to find work and Arsène Jr., now going fully by the name Walter, had also married and started a family, so she was left with Emma and John Henry to look after. They avoided the workhouse though and in 1871 were still at Pexwood, with Walter and his wife Catherine and daughter Alice living next door.
Mary and James Turner meanwhile had been travelling around for work an were building up their own family – eleven in total – and this lifestyle began to take its toll on Mary. They returned to Todmorden and moved to Bride Street where in 1879 Mary would die. She’s buried at Christ Church but we don’t know where, and it’s possible she’s in this grave but for some reason not named on the stone. It would seem strange because Mercy died in 1880, and is on this stone, and you’d think whoever was in charge of placing the stone in the future would remember…but stranger things have happened.
Emma and John Henry were now 31 and 26 respectively and as both were unmarried they decided to stick together for a while. Their nephew Young joined them at their home in Pexwood. Young was a cotton warehouse man and, well, a young man by nature as well as name, and later in 1881 he married Elizabeth Ann Greenwood. She was the daughter of a postman and after their marriage the couple moved to Woodbottom to live next door to her parents, Dan and Grace, and had two daughters together – Mary Grace and Florrie. Not to be left out, his brother Fred married Elizabeth Ann’s sister Alice! The years passed thusly, with Young and his family only appearing in the newspapers once, in 1894 when Young was fined for riding his bicycle from Waterside to Walsden without a working headlamp. Naughty. That, and the purchase of their home at Woodbottom, is all that we know of the adult Young, apart from the fact that he died in 1902 and was buried here alongside his grandmother.
(The spelling of Potentier as Potentia seems to vary from newspaper to newspaper and gives us a clue about the pronunciation)
The years also passed for Emma and John Henry. Love came late to the siblings and it wasn’t until the 1890s that their cohabitation ended. In 1892 Emma married Thomas Stansfield, a widowed father of two girls who lived just on the other side of Rochdale Road, at California. He was a cotton weaver and sometimes lamplighter. In 1897 it was John Henry’s turn, with the mysterious Susannah Clegg. We say mysterious because we aren’t quite sure who she was before her marriage; was she a Clegg by birth or was she, like Thomas Stansfield, a widow? Because many of the Potentiers were married at Knowlwood Chapel there are no marriage records available on Ancestry which would shed light on who Susannah’s father was to help us identify her further. She was a year older than John Henry, 43 when they married, and if she had been married before she brought no young children to the marriage. John Henry was a colliery banksman at this point, doing hard labour on the tops above Bacup Road, so maybe the budget didn’t extend to children anyway…
…or maybe Susannah’s health wasn’t so good. The poor woman is a bit of a mystery to us, and all we can really say in the end is that she died in 1908 and was buried here with her mother and nephew in law. John Henry never remarried. His great-niece and nephew Emma and Richard (Fred Potentier Turner’s two youngest) moved in with him at 35 Pexwood Place, a house that he had managed to purchase many years before, but by 1921 they too had moved out and on with their lives and he was left there alone. What about his sister Emma? Emma and Thomas were still happily (or at least securely) married and living with Thomas’s daughters at their home at 19 Copperas House Terrace, but Thomas was getting on a bit, and in 1922 he died at the age of 79. He was buried up at Cross Stone with his first wife Elizabeth. Emma was now on her own, seemingly. John Henry sold his house and moved in with her, and they went back to their old way of doing things until his death in 1930. Emma mourned him enough to commemorate his death in the newspapers the following year.
Emma lived a few more years, dying in 1936 at the age of 85. Brother Arsène Jr., aka Walter, had died in 1931 at the age of 89, and when you think about the difficulty this family had when young thanks to their father’s abandonment and mother’s difficult time finding work, it’s actually really impressive that so many of them lived to such an age.