A ne’er-do-well rests here, although whether it was by design or by bad luck is unknown. We can’t know how hard William actually tried.
In fact as far as can be figured, William was doing his best. He was born in 1790 at Burnt Acre (right on the border between Erringden and Stansfield, in Eastwood) to Robert and Betty Halstead, with Robert being described as a “yeoman” in the Heptonstall parish registers. This would have meant a certain amount of comfort for William and his siblings – if not in terms of material needs being met as a child, then at least in the sense of there being inheritable land and housing which could provide for Betty and the children should Robert die. And as we well know here in the graveyard people die all the time and at ages you don’t expect.
William became a butcher and in 1817 he married 19 year old Sally Hargreaves of Stansfield. Sally was able to write her own name, which is impressive for the time, and though sadly we don’t know her parentage we think she was born around 1799, maybe even 1798. Sadly the older banns pages don’t give the names of the fathers of the contracting parties – a shocking oversight, but they might not have anticipated our needs nowadays to determine which of 10,000 William Greenwoods we’re looking at on any given day! Even a Hargreaves can be hard to track down with any certainty. But from June 1st 1817 she became a Halstead and not a moment too soon as the couple’s first child, their daughter Grace, was born in December of the same year. Next came their son Gibson, then Mary Ann, and finally Betty in 1824. All the Halstead children were late to their baptisms by about two years from their birthdates but Betty was the exception, being baptised an entire eight and a half years after her birth! By the time of her baptism at Heptonstall the family had finally moved from Woodbottom down to the right side of Whiteley Arches (not that they existed yet) and were living at Blind Lane.
By 1841, the next time we come across our family, they had all moved to the Wadsworth Mill area of Shade and William was now described as an innkeeper. Also present in the household was William’s sister-in-law Hannah Halstead and her son Robert. Curiously the census only lists an occupation for Mary Ann out of all the adult children – milliner. Gibson was a butcher though, and this we know thanks to his death registration. It took a minute to find because Gibson died on December 30th and either grief or weather prevented his death being registered until 1842 had rolled around. His death is one of the more unusual ones because of his age (22) and the cause (breast cancer).
Less than 1% of people who develop breast cancer are men, and lifestyle factors that contribute usually strike older men, so Gibson truly was one of the most unlucky young men alive in Todmorden at that time.
William seems to have not taken it well…I mean, who would…but in terms of taking it badly, he took it so badly that he seems to have taken himself off. His time at the unknown inn was over. In 1843 he was jailed for neglecting his family and forcing them to obtain poor relief. Jail was the option for those who couldn’t pay the Guardians back, so he was truly in a bad position for whatever specific reason.
Now, though, remember what we said at the beginning of this story about Robert Halstead. Robert was a yeoman and so was in possession of a freehold, or maybe a few, and so there was heritable land in this family. William dug himself out of the hole he had ended up in a year after the embarrassment of being sent to jail for neglect of family. He did this by essentially turning over interest he had in some houses at Toad Carr to his creditors. It helps to have assets you can liquidate when the going gets truly tough! However this would mean that this branch of Halsteads would have little for future generations. No one else might be able to have a bailout of their own.
Three years later William was once more bankrupt, now insolvent, and what little was left was handed over to the courts. With his debts paid, life went on; Grace and Betty had by now both married and moved out, and just William, Sally and Mary Ann were left. Grace’s firstborn daughter Betty came to live with her aunt and grandparents to keep them cheerful, we suppose – there’s no other reason we can figure for her being there. Mary Ann’s fortunes had improved from earlier when she and her mother had to turn to the parish for relief and was now running a successful millinery business by 1851 with three employees and William’s brother Richard and his and Hannah’s older son John had returned from wherever they were in 1841. This blended family unit were now living at the bottom of Dobroyd and William was back butchering.
William never appeared in the papers again. He died in 1857 and was buried here alongside Gibson. Sally, Mary Ann and little Betty stayed at their cottage at Dobroyd and made their money from Mary Ann’s dressmaking and millinery business. Money might not flow freely but it flowed freely enough that Sally was spared having to go back to work. She carried on until 1869 when she died and was buried here.
Some of her grandchildren are buried here at Christ Church and we’ll tell their stories another time. What about Mary Ann? She and her niece Betty Jackson stayed together a little longer, but in 1872 Betty married a dyer from Halifax and in 1873 Mary Ann married a chemist from Manchester, and so just like the other siblings, their stories end elsewhere.