37.22 – Mary and John Dawson, and Betty, Mary Ann, John Thomas, Jane and John Spencer

If that title gave you a headache, spare a thought for us poor researchers, trying to untangle this multigenerational tale full of illegitimate children and marriages that weren’t. Thankfully Daniel Noble’s excellent family tree on Ancestry gave us some help with piecing it all together.

Mary’s story starts off easily enough. She was born in 1794 as Mary Crowther, possibly the daughter of George and Hannah Crowther of Cliviger. In November 1820 she married a Todmorden clogger named Thomas Dawson. A little late for their first child, Betty, who was born in 1818 at Todmorden Edge.

Same for their second child, John, born the following year. Their other three children would be born Dawsons but Betty and John both took their father’s name somewhat illegally. Ann was born in 1822, Jane in 1824 and Sarah in 1831. Sometime before 1841 Thomas died, and on the Census then there are two families living next to each other at Mount Pleasant (now behind the train station). Household #1 has Mary with John, Jane and Sarah, and a young lodger named Grace Bamford and her two year old son Edmund. Household #2 is James and Betty (Dawson) Spencer.

Let’s take these lives in turn.

Mary and John Dawson: Mary never left Mount Pleasant. She found work as a bread baker, and as her other children moved out, her son John stayed behind. She occasionally took in lodgers to help supplement their income. John worked first as a weaver and then as a cotton mule piecer and spinner. By 1861 her daughter Sarah had moved back in with her and John, along with two grandchildren: John L. Dawson and Mary Ann Spencer (but a different one from the one in this grave). Mary died in 1868 and John and his niece and nephew stayed on in the house a while longer. He had a life – at an inquest on drowning victim James Gill in 1870, John was called as a witness, and spoke about walking along the canal side with his sweetheart before coming across Gill moaning in the arched tunnel below Neddy Bridge – but he never married, and in the end, his neighbour’s wife Sarah Greenwood was at his side nursing him when he died in 1874 from pneumonitis.

Betty Dawson Spencer-maybe-also-Greenwood: yes, this is one of those stories.

Betty married cotton weaver James Spencer in 1839, and at first things went quite a bit differently than it had for her parents. She and James managed to get their marriage in a month before the birth of their first child, a daughter named Susannah (after James’s mother), but little Susannah died five weeks later and was buried somewhere unknown here at Christ Church. No more children seem to have come until Thomas in 1846 and then Mary Ann in 1848. 1848 brought death as well as life; James died that year at their house on Roomfield Lane (now Halifax Road).

This wasn’t the end for Betty’s reproductive life though. In 1852 her son John was born, and in 1854 along came a daughter named Jane. Betty found love again in possibly-still-married cotton beamer Joseph Greenwood, and in 1861 was living with him, his daughter Margaret, her children Thomas, John and Jane, and a little boy named Joseph Jr. who was ten months old at the time of the census. He did not live long and died aged four in 1864. Betty, Joseph and children moved to Hough Stones and on the 1871 Census were still noted as husband and wife…but by the 1881 Census, despite still living together, their statuses had changed to “unmarried” and Betty was once more sporting the surname Spencer. The law, or public records at least, had caught up with them. They continued to live together at Meadow Bottom until Betty’s death in 1890. The notice in the newspaper named her as Betty Spencer too.

Jane Spencer: Jane, what were you thinking??? May have been what some of her family thought of her at times. Jane wasn’t a bad woman, she didn’t drink or fight or do anything disgraceful that could make the newspapers…but she definitely held little truck with the idea of marriage, or with affiliation orders it seems, as we can’t find mention of her in that context either. In 1879 her son John Thomas arrived, then Mary Ann in 1885, and finally Emma in 1887. She never married, choosing to live with her brother John until her death in 1928 from heart failure. In some ways she was vulnerable – in a court case in 1913 involving dodgy insurance salesmen, she had to explain in court that she couldn’t read and relied on her brother or others to read documents to her before she signed them – and as she got older and could no longer weave she ended up working as a charwoman, which is hard work for an older woman. She also saw a lot of loss…which we’ll get to now. Luckily there were people around her who loved her and supported her so much, and missed her so much too.

Mary Ann Spencer: this Mary Ann, born in 1885, was named for her departed aunt, Jane’s older sister Mary Ann, who had died ten years earlier only a week after giving birth (and who is buried in the private area at E6.3) and who had clearly been missed. Sadly this Mary Ann would not fare much better. She became a card room hand, but died in July 1899 from a weak heart, quite literally. If it was weakened from illness it must have been earlier in her life, but what a blow to her mother and family. Uncle John was at her side when she died.

John Thomas Spencer: Jane’s eldest child also broke her heart. At the age of 12 John Thomas developed epilepsy, or a lesser version of the condition grew worse, and unfortunately for the Spencers they did not have the luxury of live-in nursemaids like the Lord family over at Fair View. John Thomas had to go to work. He found a job at Adamroyd Mill and was kept away from machinery because of his disability, but while on the toilet one day in May 1900 he had a seizure and hit his head as he fell, and was dead before anyone noticed him gone. His fellow workers rushed to pry the door off the hinges once someone realised how long he had been gone but it was too late.

(side note: it was not all loss for Jane. Her youngest child, Emma, stayed with her through thick and thin and had a nice long life, dying in 1968. She’s buried at Christ Church – maybe here?)

John Spencer: at last, we come to John, faithful reader-of-letters to his sister and bedside attendant to his niece and nephew. John lived a quiet life, working and doing who knows what when he wasn’t working – nothing criminal or scurrilous. He worked as a weaver until he couldn’t anymore, and stayed in his and Emma’s home at 27 Meadowbottom until the very end in 1937. His end was a decent age, 83 years old, and down to senility and general old age. Don’t worry, Emma remembered him in the newspapers too.

The Dawsons/Spencers were normal people living lives that were honestly pretty unremarkable by today’s standards. We only look with such surprise on their loose approaches to marriage because they were so unusual for the time, and maybe also because it wasn’t accompanied by some other issue that fed naughty behaviour or a lack of care for society’s standards. But no, this family just wanted to live quietly and have the lives they wanted, as far as was possible. Good for them.