This is mainly a story about some Stephensons of Hanging Ditch and the routes they took in life – however far they travelled they always came back, and now they aren’t about to travel anywhere anytime soon… At two ends of the age spectrum are a pair of siblings, Sarah (aka Sally) and James. Sarah …
Read more “37A.26 – Mary, Benjamin and Sarah Bottomley, and James, Wright and Sarah Ann Stephenson”
Mother and daughter, together forever – thanks to descendant Leesa Harwood for this story. We love guest posts, so if you have an ancestor whose story we haven’t told yet and that you want to share, get in touch! Betty Lord was born on 30th June 1848 in Stansfield, Todmorden. Her father was John Lord …
Back in 1808… Back in 1986… Back in 2002…no, that’s not right either…back in September 2024, our Chair and Secretary went on a jaunt around Calderdale inspecting some closed non-conformist graveyards, and their final stop was Cross Lanes Baptist up the Buttress, above Hebden Bridge, to scout out some stones that linked either to Lumbutts …
Read more “43.21 – Greenwood, Henry, Mary Ellen and Sarah Baldwin (inaccessible)”
Next time you wander up Stansfield Hall Road and stop to smell the flowers, ask yourself who might have been smelling them 120 years ago…and who might have been planting them then too. This grave’s story starts in Child’s Ercall, Shropshire, in 1836 with the birth of Richard Green. Richard grew up in a household …
Sometimes only a fleeting spell in Todmorden is enough to draw someone back later, in the hopes of a better life. Thanks to Leesa Harwood for sending us this story about her ancestors! The gravestone in Christ Church Graveyard marks the burial place of Charles Neesham, his wife Jane (Kilburn) Neesham and their daughter Margaret …
This grave piqued this researcher’s interest while writing up the story of Winifred Hogan, mainly because Mary here started her life as a Hogan. The TAS’s transcript knew about three of the four inhabitants here, and the fourth – Mary – is only a guess, but it seems like a realistic one. Where else would …
Read more “21.34 – Sarah Hannah, Mary, John and William Butterworth (unmarked)”
Winifred looks to be lying here alone, but we think she might have some family with her – some small comfort (hopefully) for a woman who died young. Winifred’s story begins with that of her parents, William Hogan and Margaret O’Donohoe. William and Margaret were both Irish immigrants who married in Shrewsbury in 1852. William …
This is one of our mysteries of the graveyard, and a tale about the power of grief and shame. Caroline Coles was not a poor woman, and her husband not without some local prestige; so where’s her grave, and where are her two children who are buried here? They might be at this plot marker …
Read more “Caroline Elizabeth Coles and her children (location unknown)”
A Todmorden couple who crossed the border to Burnley, but held on to their Todmorden links to the end. Alice Stott opens this story as the older member of the pair. She was born Alice Davies in 1827, the second youngest child of her father Peter and mother Hannah (Jackson). She grew up in the …
A lost plot marker – a family who left – and two brothers who never met…and perhaps a grandfather and grandmother to boot. Edmund Tattersall Stephenson had a glorious name and a dirty job; that of engine stoker. He had been born in Newchurch in 1860 to John Dewhirst Stephenson and his wife Harriet, formerly …