Much like the story of Peter and James Studdard, this story is also about the people who aren’t here – the bridges. John and Ann are grandfather and granddaughter. Their stories are short, but the story in between…well!
But first things first. John Staley was born in 1796 in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire. Quite a few Staleys hail from that area and we can make guesses about his parentage but they’re only that: guesses. At some point (again unknown) he married Isabella, or Bella, Handley of Garsdale, probably while travelling for work. John was getting in on the ground (or ground-ish) floor of a developing trade, that of gas fitting. And this is what brought him, Bella, and their children Ann and Joseph to Todmorden.. The Fieldens weren’t just the biggest spinning business in town, but they were also for a long time the only purveyors of gas in Todmorden. They ran some of their equipment on gas and supplied gas to other businesses too. People nearby were keen to get hold of some, and there were also murmurs about how the Fieldens shouldn’t get all the fun. Was John headhunted, or did he go where the work promised to be? Good question.
What we know is that he lived at 14 Little Holme Street in Shade, and that he died in 1842 and was buried here. His family could afford a gravestone so he must have been doing well. A shame he didn’t live to 1845 and the formation of the Todmorden Gas Company and the opening of the Gas Works on Halifax Road two years later…
Bella remarried a few years later to widower John Fielden (not that one) who she would have nearly ten years with before his own death. Daughter Ann had already married and left home, and son Joseph was thinking along the same lines. In 1845 he married local girl Frances Holdsworth. A son, John, was born in 1848, another son, George, in 1850, and in 1851 a daughter, Ann, was born. Ann, technically born a Burnley lass, did not have John or George’s luck and within 9 months had died. A long-since-vanished sexton’s record places her burial here with her grandfather. Bella and John Fielden were, curiously, looking after little John Staley on the 1851 Census along with John’s children from a previous marriage, and after John Fielden’s death Bella took little John back up north, where she found work in Sedburgh as a grocer and tea dealer with him as her shop boy. That’s as far as their story here goes.
What of Joseph and Frances? Well they kept George with them and went to Burnley along with Frances’s sister Elizabeth and next door to Frances’s brother Jesse and his wife. Joseph was by now a tin plate worker. The couple had another child, a daughter named Sarah Ann, in 1855. But trouble was brewing in paradise if it hadn’t already finished brewing by then…because by the time Sarah Ann was born Joseph had scarpered. Scarpered to the United States, to Georgia, where he bigamously married the twelve-years-his-junior Martha Jane Saunders and had a daughter with her, Sarah Isabella Staley, in 1855. JOSEPH! You scoundrel.
(In Joseph’s defense, he had by his own reckoning moved to America in 1853, and Sarah Ann’s christening register entry states that Frances is a single woman, so perhaps she was the scoundrel…)
To compound his alleged scoundrelry, Joseph also joined the Confederate Army when the US Civil War broke out. Maybe word got back to England that he had died, because in 1864 Frances remarried, calling herself a widow on the certificate. He hadn’t died though, merely been off fighting. He survived the war (not shabby given 7,000 men from Georgia died during the war) and went back to tinsmithing, but expanded his business and enjoyed a great deal of success, even becoming mayor of Milledgeville. He and Martha Jane never had any more children. Sarah Isabella, who mainly went by Isabella, went on to marry, and Joseph died in 1909 (1910 on his stone is an error, as is 1826 – he was born in 1824) having never returned to the UK.
An biographical sketch from 1889 about important people in Baldwin County, GA that covers Joseph’s life reads very intriguingly to us here, and involves more than a few omissions of truth:
No better illustration of what industry joined to intelligence and sobriety will accomplish can be found than in the case of the subject of this sketch. He was born in Lancastershire, England, March 26, 1824, and after receiving an ordinary education and the rudiments of a trade as a tinner, came to this country and located in Milledgeville, Ga., beginning life as a journeyman. After two years of hard work and strict economy he saved enough from his earnings to open a small tin-shop. In time he added a stock of hardware and his business grew; until the opening of the war he was driving a splendid trade and was on the road to wealth and independence. Like many others who were just fairly getting started he closed his store, sacrificed his property, and threw himself and fortunes into the uncertain conflict of arms. He joined the “Baldwin Blues,” which were mustered into the Fourth Georgia regiment and sent into the Fourth Georgia regiment and sent to join the conflict then raging in Virginia. After some service in the army of north Virginia, he was discharged on account of failing health and sent home, when he was placed in the State armory and there remained until the surrender. At the close he opened a small shop again and began anew. By the exercise of the same industry and economy, and the same attention to his own affairs which characterized his earlier years, his business has grown and prospered and he now has the best house of the kind in any country town in middle Georgia; not only that, but he has interests outside. he has been active in the movements to secure for his town a system of gas and water works, a street car line and a building and loan association. He has also been one of the aldermen of the town many years, and was recently elected mayor. He has become thoroughly Americanized, although of foreign birth, and is in active sympathy with all distinctively American interests.
(thanks to gmartha1958 on Ancestry for sharing this to her entry for Joseph)
What a shame that no one – not Joseph, not Frances – stayed behind long enough to make sure little Ann’s name was included on the stone. Did he remember his first family? Did he have regrets? Never mind – it’s all history now. The gravestone is still here though so make sure that anyone who takes the time to look has a chance to be reminded.
awwwww, that’s very sad about little Ann.