This little plot marker required paging through scans to find, since the older burial registers are often written out in ways that cause problems for Ancestry’s scan-to-text software. I found M.A. in the end – Mary Alty of Knowlwood, the daughter of Robert and Ruth, buried on July 28th 1842 aged 20 weeks old.
Mary was born in February 1842 and was baptised at Christ Church on May 18th, only two and a bit months before she would die and be buried here. Robert Alty (or Olty) was a moulder, someone who worked with iron and who you would often find working in a foundry or machine shop. He was born in 1817 and hailed originally from Bradford, coming to Todmorden looking for work like so many did in the 1830s as industry boomed. He and Ruth Fielden of Knowlwood were married in December 1836 at St. Chad’s in Rochdale and two years later they welcomed along their first child, James. Mary would be their second, and last.
After Mary’s death the couple moved with James to Bury, again, in search of work. Ruth died there in 1849 having had no more children and is buried at an unnamed Methodist chapel there, in a “stranger” grave according to the sexton’s book. Robert remarried about ten years later and died in Blackburn in 1868. Brother James stayed on in Bury and died in 1910.
A short story for a small marker.