43.6 – Mary and John Scholfield, and Mary Halstead

“In hope of a blessed Resurrection”…this story is short, as the longer story sits in between the two generations buried here.

John Scholfield was an 18th Century baby, born at the tail end of 1799 in Walsden. He was a stonemason. That’s all we know about him really, as he wasn’t a major player in the history of the town, at least not in a way that was ever memorialised – who knows, maybe he helped build something we walk past every day…but we don’t know. In 1837, surprisingly late (at the age of 38) he married young Mary Law who was also from Walsden. Young as in twelve years younger, but also late for a young woman in those times as she would have been 26. Whatever held them both back for so long had been set aside.

In those days, though, you had to be quick about things because mortality was harder to delay then than it is now. The couple married in November 1837; their daughter Sarah was born in late 1838; Mary died in July 1839 from “fever”, frustratingly vague but that’s all we know. That’s how Sarah ended up being their only child. John was living alone at their home in Clough in 1841 while little Sarah was being raised elsewhere, and in 1844 he died from acute rheumatism and was buried here as well.

Sarah’s story is a longer one so we’ll save it for her grave, which is here at Christ Church but a laid-flat one which was laid flat before we turned up, and so not transcribed. In short, she married John Halstead of Ing Bottom who was the son of Cornholme cotton manufacturer John Sutcliffe Halstead. The couple married in 1862 and had five children together. Their second child and first daughter, Mary, is buried here with her grandparents. Mary died in March 1870 only a month shy of her second birthday. We think that Sarah and John’s last child, their son John Sutcliffe Halstead, is also buried here; he died in 1875 which places his death too early for where the Halstead grave is situated within the upper slope’s grid. It’s strange he isn’t named here when Mary is, but both he and Mary are named on the family grave at what would be marked on our transcript as 42.53 if we had it marked out. We can’t prove it, but we can’t see him named anywhere else in the yard, so we have to go with our gut.