Sometimes the connections between people in a grave are harder to work out than others. We bring you the story of the Horsfall siblings, and their cousin’s granddaughter.
The story really begins with John and Mary Horsfall of Moss Hall. John was a shopkeeper, apparently, and he and his wife raised a little crop of Horsfalls who were born in the 1790s and very early 1800s. Older son William was born in 1792, and younger son Thomas was born in 1796. William’s line is where the three siblings come from, and Thomas’s is where the mysterious young woman comes from. Starting with William…
William married Sarah (Sally) Helliwell on the very last day of December 1812 at St. John’s in Halifax. Almost two years later their first son, Helliwell, was born. He was baptised in November 1814 and their address was given as East Lee, and William’s occupation was weaver. More children followed – John, Elizabeth, Susannah, Wilson, Sarah Ann, and Hannah. William and family moved from Blackshaw Head down into Todmorden and settled first at Mount Pleasant and later at Hanging Ditch, in the centre. This is most likely because of the introduction of the power loom driving people from farms on the tops down into the industrial valley bottoms. In 1841 William is a hand loom weaver, but Helliwell, Elizabeth, Susannah and Wilson are all power loom weavers. This was the legacy of the Industrial Revolution – even in the countryside, the population condensed itself around the mills…
Sally died in 1850 and was buried in the private area of Christ Church’s graveyard along with Hannah, Susannah and John, who had all died in the 1840s. Now only the three siblings on this stone were still alive and remaining at home with their father. William worked a variety of manual labour trades, from boiler coverer to coal dealer. Helliwell stuck with his power looms and Sarah Ann joined him, while Elizabeth did everything from dressmaker to personal servant. The Horsfalls were hard grafters; they had no choice. Especially during the cotton famine, they had to do everything they could to survive when half the household depended on cotton for their wages.
William died in the 1860s and in 1871 the remaining three unmarried siblings were living at Crescent, near Morrisons now, with Elizabeth having gone back to her former occupation as a dressmaker. Death comes to us all and it came in that decade for Helliwell. In 1876 he suffered a stroke in the night and died the same day after a second one.
Elizabeth and Sarah Ann moved from Crescent to Peel Street in Cobden, and then to Stansfield Road, and Elizabeth showed some resourcefulness and somehow became a grocer. The 1881 Census shows her and Sarah Ann at 13 Stansfield Road with Sarah Ann still weaving, but Elizabeth not named as a grocer’s assistant or clerk but simply as a grocer. Like her shopkeeper grandfather, she was in business. The business didn’t last long though and Elizabeth died in 1889 while staying up at Cross Stone.
Sarah Ann was left alone. She moved to Calder Street, right in the centre of town near the Oddfellows Hall, and made her living from that point on by taking in boarders. No longer weaving, her only occupation was household duties. And fair enough – she had worked hard her entire life. But it was too early to stop working as it turned out, and a regular income wasn’t forthcoming. She may have also been unwell for other reasons; we don’t know why, but she ended her days at the Union Workhouse, aka Stansfield View. The newspaper kindly did not mention this and gave her former address at Peel Street instead.
She was the last Horsfall into this particular grave, being interred in September 1911. As the last of the siblings there was no one left to put her name on the stone. But she wasn’t the last person into this grave….there was someone left who could have put her name on this stone…but instead they made sure that the LAST person into this grave was remembered, even if it was so near to the bottom that even we missed the inscription on our first pass through the yard retranscribing the stones.
Time to go back to the early 1800s and to Thomas Horsfall, William’s younger brother. Thomas married Hannah Ormerod of Burnley in 1816 and, like William, started a decently sized family. One of their children, Martha, was born in 1820. These Horsfalls stayed up at Blackshaw Head and settled on Shaw Lane where they lived near to the Shuttleworth family, farmers and weavers. One of the Shuttleworth boys, Henry, caught Martha’s eye, and in March 1839 she gave birth to a little girl named Ann. The family shame was so great that Martha had to take Ann back her mother Hannah’s home turf at Holme Chapel to get her baptised (where they gave Martha’s address as Shay Lane).
Martha and Ann stayed with Thomas and Hannah and her siblings, but in 1843 Martha married Richard Dewhirst and he took Ann in as his own. Richard and Martha had two more daughters and a son and moved down to Millwood and the Priestwell area (near where the funeral home is now, formerly the National School). Ann became a power loom weaver, unsurprisingly. In 1857 she married another weaver named Thomas Greenwood and they settled at Goshen Terrace and had six children, one of whom was Annie Greenwood, born in 1866. This is why we know Henry Shuttleworth was Ann’s father and Martha’s lover – Ann named him as her father on her birth certificate.
Annie grew up at Honey Hole and while she and her sisters became weavers, Thomas became a bread baker, and possibly through his trade she came into contact with Fred Hirst. Fred was a Walsden lad who had become a corn miller, and even though by 1891 Thomas had jacked in baking for a drapery business so as to follow in his tailor father’s footsteps, Fred was working hard to make a name for himself and impressed Annie enough that they were married in 1893. Their only child, Agnes Mary, was born in 1895, and soon afterwards the Hirsts went to Pendleton in Salford to settle down for good.
Why Pendleton? Well, Richard and Martha Dewhirst had moved there ten years previously and Richard had become the lodge keeper at Weaste Hall. Martha died in 1899 and Richard in 1905, and on the 1911 Census Fred, Annie and Agnes Mary were living at 63 Eccles Road – the same address where Richard was living in 1901. Annie’s connection with her grandparents must have been strong. They’re buried at Cross Stone, though, which leads to the last question here…
…why is Annie here and not there? Only a month after Sarah Ann Horsfall was buried here, Annie joined her. Her death sounds to have been a painful one for everyone; tuberculosis, a pelvic abscess, and exhaustion. Unsurprisingly. She was only 45.
Again, why she’s buried here is unclear. Her parents outlived her, being buried up at Cross Stone in 1922 and 1930. They will have been the ones who made sure her name went onto the stone here, although why they left Sarah Ann off is unknown. They certainly left room for her and a few other names!
Agnes Mary’s fate is unknown – we couldn’t find a conclusive death or marriage registration for her and the 1921 Census was no help. Fred remarried and died in 1947. This stone was left to grow a great big tree in front of it, and for unknown vegetation behind to begin the graveyard conservator’s least favourite process: delamination. And in this case scouring as well; this stone is not long for this world. We’re glad we found Annie’s name and were able to bring the connections between these relatives into the light before it ended up being too late.
