43.4 – John, Hannah and John Whitaker

Older graves are fun because they’re often the places where you learn about seeds getting planted for other, later burials. That’s a clumsy way of putting it, but you’ll see what we mean.

John Whitaker was born in Littleborough around 1794. We don’t know who his parents were, only that he and his brother James both became blacksmiths, and that a few years after John married Hannah Law of Todmorden the extended Whitaker families moved here. Their marriage occurred in 1817 at Heptonstall and within two years their first daughter, Mally, and James and his wife Grace’s first two daughters Mally and Hannah, were all being baptised together at St. Mary’s.

After Mally came John Jr., then Sarah, and finally Hannah (Jr.) in 1825. That was it for John and Hannah. As for work, we don’t know about James’s smithing talents but John was good, and took on apprentices as time went on. One of them was James Greenlees, the son of Sally and father of Sam and Matthew Greenlees. See what we mean about seeds? It’s all connected in the graveyard. All this was pre-1841 so we know about it from the newspapers, and this particular fact we know because both John and his apprentice were witnesses regarding the murder of John Horsfall in 1831. Horsfall had stopped in for a drink at an unnamed pub where he was offered clogs for sale by a man drinking there, and when he turned them down saying they might be stolen and he’d seen stolen items sold there before, the landlord hit him so hard he fell to the ground and broke his neck. Horsfall was buried in a shallow grave in Knotts Wood but someone blabbed eventually…all three men were eventually acquitted of the murder and went on with their lives, although the landlord – Jeremiah Suthers – ended up hanging himself in 1848. Who knows.

Halifax Express, June 18th 1831

That’s enough of a sidetrack though. Easily done as we have so little information about the family. The children grew up but John Jr. died in 1841 at the age of 21, of a “lumbar abscess” – uggh! – and so was buried here. John Sr. was the informant, present at his son’s death.

John Sr. was left with no sons to carry on. All three daughters married – two of them married men named John Barker, no relation to each other – and by 1861 John and Hannah were living with daughter Sarah, her husband Thomas Mills, and their children. John continued to work and in 1861 was described on the census as a “master blacksmith”. Later that year though Hannah died aged 66, and two years later John died aged 69. Both joined their only son here.

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