A father, a son, and a daughter in law – and a telling gap in the engraving that raises a question…where’s Sarah?
Abram, or Abraham, Stansfield was born in Todmorden in 1811 to parents whose names we can’t be certain of. There are only 14 Abraham Stansfields on a census return in 1841, and thanks to that census not specifying people’s relationships to one another, the only one with a job relating to shoes – who lived in Rochdale – can’t be verified or ruled out. That Abraham was living with a woman named Ann Stansfield and four children. We aren’t convinced this is him, but unfortunately this means that we can’t figure out who his parents were based on siblings or on older people in the household. Oh well! That’s a good start isn’t it?
The whole story is, unfortunately, quite short. The Stansfields didn’t get up to much, really. In 1842 Abraham married Sarah Whitehead at St. Thomas in Heptonstall. Sarah was a servant whose family farmed at The Royd and whose father Thomas was elderly and blind. Sarah’s brother George ran the farm under his direction. Abraham, who was a cordwainer (a shoe and boot maker), moved in with Sarah’s family and together the couple had three sons – George, Charles and Thomas. As you may have guessed, Charles was the unlucky one, and he was buried here in 1848 aged just under two years old.
George and Thomas didn’t follow in Abraham’s footsteps, and instead became millwrights and iron founders, in that order. In 1864 George married Betty Baumforth, a cotton weaver who lived at Ashenhurst Fold. Her father John, a worsted weaver, had died ten years previously and Betty had been helping to support her widowed mother Hannah along with her brothers. Her time as Betty Stansfield was very short, though – the couple married in June 1864, and Betty died in October 1865. The couple had moved to Toad Carr and she had caught bronchitis, which in those days was absolutely not too mild to kill an otherwise (we assume) health 26 year old woman.
Life went on – George remarried, Thomas married for the first time, and Abraham continued to make and mend shoes and boots from The Royd until the Whiteheads gave up the farm. At that point he and Sarah moved down to Canteen Street in Lydgate to be nearer Thomas and his wife Sarah Jane. In 1877 Abraham died and left behind an estate valued up to £800, which wasn’t bad at all. He never seemed to advertise in the newspapers or almanacks so he must have either inherited some money or been extremely, quietly, successful with shoes. They do say that the best craftspeople don’t need to advertise, don’t they?
That’s the three in this grave – a short story indeed – but that gap is intriguing. Gaps are left for people who aren’t dead yet, and so when Betty died, it was clear that Abraham and Sarah said “leave space for our names and then add hers in further down”. Maybe the intention was that it would read Charles, the two of them, Betty, and any other daughters in law or grandchildren. The problem was that George and Thomas’s wives, new wives, whichever, all had roots at Cross Stone. So Betty was going to probably always be the last name on the stone…
…having said that, there’s this gap for Sarah’s name and details. Sarah moved in with Thomas after her bereavement and would die in 1888, and she IS buried at Christ Church…but in an unmarked grave in the lower yard, next to Orah Stacey.
What sort of family drama, or neglect, caused this to happen? Did Sarah not actually want to be buried with her son and husband and daughter in law? Did her sons decide not to bury her with them? They certainly chose not to give her a gravestone. This isn’t a mystery we can solve.