These Congregationalists are just a small fragment of a large, blended, and ultimately rather mysteriously tragic family.
The tragedy of this family is a fairly standard one for its time, if an exaggerated version of it. Medicine wasn’t all people wanted it to be back then. But even so…
To start at the beginning we start with the birth of James Uttley, on Boxing Day 1828, to Jacob and Sally (Halliwell) Uttley of Todmorden. The Uttleys were on the face of it Anglicans and James was baptised at Cross Stone, but James’s religious future was at a little chapel called Patmos Methodist New Connexion Chapel. Something of a mouthful, and by 1841 it became simply Patmos Congregational – new name, new denomination. James became a fixture there, although whether that started off as a personal declaration of faith or because of a girl, well…
…Martha Halstead of Millwood was baptised a Baptist and attended Patmos. In 1849, when both were 20, they were married at St. Chad’s in Rochdale. The couple had four children together – Hannah, Grace, Sarah Ann, and Mary Ellen – all baptised at Patmos. In early 1859 though James was doubly bereaved, with both Martha and little Mary Ellen both dying. The burial registers for Patmos are fantastic resources for family historians because they made note of the cause of death. Martha died from our old friend phthsis, and Mary Ellen from a cause unrecorded.
Meanwhile, another parishioner named Hannah (Bentley) Brownbridge was also going through it. Hannah was a year younger than the Uttleys and married John Brownbridge in 1849, the same year James and Martha were wed. John was a mechanic and the couple lived at Calder Street near where the indoor market now stands. They also had only daughters, Ann and Sarah, but Sarah would never have a chance to meet her father; John died in 1853 from “inflammation”, just before Sarah’s birth. Two years later in 1855 Ann died. Hannah was left with a little girl and poor prospects, and soon James would be left with four little girls and probably no clue what to do next. That’s how, only two months after Martha’s death, James remarried.
More bereavements followed this unlucky family unit. James and Hannah had three children, John Willie, Jim, and Mary. John Willie was born in 1860 and made an appearance on the 1861 Census before dying in August 1861 of measles – you can see him in the image above. Jim was born in 1863 but died in 1864, in 1865 Sarah Brownbridge died, and in 1866 Mary also died. John had lost “only” four of his seven children, but Hannah had now lost every one of her five children. A year later at the end of 1867 Hannah joined her children and first husband in a grave at Patmos, probably not far from where Martha and her daughter were buried. This is a level of child loss (and wife loss!) hard to comprehend in modern days, and even then, it was very poor. Todmorden had one of the lower child and infant mortality rates in Yorkshire but even at its height their losses were higher than the rate in the 1850s of around 27%.
So roll on 1867 and James was now two times a widower, with three more or less grown children. James was a man who needed a companion and March 1868 saw him marrying for the third and final time, to Sarah Halstead (no relation to Martha!) of Back Brook Street.
Now in the meantime James had been working hard and had moved away from dyeing and become a cotton warehouseman, and later a manager for Maden and Hoyle’s at Derdale Mill. The Uttleys had moved from their smaller home on John Street over to Wood Street on Harley Bank.
James was a popular attendee, a deacon, and was even credited at one point with having been involved heavily in both the purchase of the old chapel and the building of the new one, which opened in 1887. He was also the Chapel’s Sunday School teacher for 47 years. A respected man in the church and at work…with a trail of death behind him. Now that sounds ridiculous, yes, we know, but it’s true. It’s strange to the modern brain.
Sarah Halstead had a humble story and there isn’t a great deal to say about her. Born in 1833, she also came from nonconformist stock, and in fact would marry James at Eastwood Myrtle Grove Congregationalist chapel. Her father William was a labourer and worked away from home when necessary, leaving Sarah and her siblings Hannah and Barker working hard from an early age while their mother Mary was a laundress. Barker would find success selling furniture and draperies, opening a shop at Patmos, but Sarah kept on as a weaver, single, until her marriage at age 35.
Post-marriage, Grace continued to live with the couple. James and Sarah wouldn’t have any children of their own so she had no competition. As the others married and moved away she continued to work as a cotton weaver. The Uttleys made a move away from Wood Street to a larger house on Commercial Street despite there being fewer and fewer of them. Meanwhile James continued to serve at Patmos on top of his work, and as the 1880s and then 1890s came he continued to get accolades from his work and church colleagues.
In 1897 he died, and as you can probably guess was buried here. There was no chance of him joining either of his other wives or children because Patmos’s graveyard had been closed by Order of the Privy Council at some point before then – certainly before 1893 when the age-old “cemetery question” was again being discussed by Todmorden’s councillors eager to figure out where on earth all these inconvenient dead people were going to be buried going forward. One of the answers then was “unfortunately Christ Church” as there were concerns about the low-lying land and remains of the old river bed which once ran through the lower half of the yard. James clearly was thinking ahead and made sure he had a spot up near the top. It’s strange for such a modern grave to be up here though, in and amongst the 1830s-1850s graves, and we did check for other family members in the burial registers who might have predated them, but no joy. Maybe the grave was owned by a nonconformist Uttley or Halstead, bought and paid for before they decided to be buried at Patmos instead. Who knows.
It’s interesting that probate gives his occupation as store-keeper, and his estate as not even two hundred pounds. If James had a sudden change of career at the very end of his life then we know nothing of it. Perhaps we’re on the wrong track with that occupation and he was looking after a store as in a warehouse?
Grace and Sarah stayed together, more evidence that Sarah can’t have been an intolerable character, and in 1901 both were described as “living off their own means”. But Grace wasn’t much longer for this world and in 1903 she died, only 47 years old, and was buried here. Sarah went to lodge with a single woman named Ann Howorth at Ridge Bank, probably an acquaintance as they were around the same age, and she carried on there until her own death in 1911. Both Grace and Sarah received just a line in the papers to mark their passing…but also their names on this stone which, when there are so many around them in this area without a stone, and when none of the other Uttleys and Brownbridges in this story have marked graves, is an accomplishment.
