Mary Ormerod, in this triple-sized grave, gets a story page all of her own. Why? Because Mary is a unicorn in the graveyard, and because she is the quintessential “lost woman” in her family’s story.
Mary was born Mary Stansfield, in 1815, to corn miller William Greenwood of Scaitcliffe Mill and…well. This is why she’s a unicorn. Readers and researchers will know that it’s a common mystery to not know the paternity of an illegitimate child, due to the rules around the registration of births. Often there might be a bastardy or affiliation order made in the courts that might clear that up, but generally, the mother is the one we know and the father is the one we can only guess at. So Mary here is one of our rare exceptions to the rule. Even rarer, we have two possible names. And they’re quite big names.
John and Esther Stansfield of Ewood Hall had eight children, three of whom were girls – Betty in 1793, Hannah in 1798, and Sarah in 1806. None of the three ever married. Given Mary’s date of birth of 1815, which doesn’t change throughout her life, we can rule Sarah out as the mother. So who is it going to be; Betty or Hannah? Either one is a contender, even with Hannah being on the slightly younger side. 17 years old isn’t too old to have a baby, after all! More curious, though, is the lack of a baptism record for Mary. That’s one way to hide a scandal from the public view…just don’t acknowledge the baby’s birth at all.
Very few of the Stansfield siblings married in the end – only two of the brothers – and so Mary grew up at Ewood Hall surrounded by aunts and uncles (and a mother) and servants, most of whom we hope loved her very much. Uncle Ashton and his wife Mary moved to Harley Bank, and uncle William and his wife Ann moved to Haslingden, where Ann was from originally. In 1841 Mary had some younger company at Ewood with her cousin Esther but it was mostly adults around her. And, of course, her father William was a stone’s throw away with his wife and children, her half-siblings, but there’s no evidence of Mary having any contact with them. Her world was the Stansfield family. Maybe when she met her future husband, James Haworth Wilson, she saw her future opening up…
James’s story is partly told as part of the story of his family, but it’s worth retreading some of it now to explain Mary’s part in it. Whether they met here in Tod or when Mary was visiting her cousins in Haslingden, James’s hometown, is unknown – but in 1844 James applied for a marriage license and the pair were married at the parish church there. Interestingly, James was rebaptised into the Anglican church, presumably to make Mary’s family happy, but Mary wasn’t. Or if she was, it wasn’t here, or anywhere else we could find. The mystery of which sister was her mother continues to deepen as a result. James was a chemist and druggist, and bright, and about to head down to Cambridge in a few months time to study at Queens College as a “pensioner”, ie. a self-funded scholar. If Mary thought she was about to go on an adventure, she was quite possibly very wrong. There’s no record of her being in Cambridge at any point during the next five years. There’s little evidence of James being there either, to be fair, apart from Cambridge’s matriculation records and a magistrates court case from 1846 where he was found to owe a woman names Mary Ann Shepherd over £7. He might have left her in Haslingden, or Todmorden, or sent her to Whitworth to live with his family even. The last one seems unlikely as the Wilsons were an unhealthy bunch themselves. The couple never had any children, and James came home to die in 1849 from follicular enteritis, and Mary went back to Todmorden to lick her wounds amongst her Stansfield family.
That’s where she probably met Mr. Abraham Ormerod J.P., owner of Ridgefoot House and one of the three Ormerod Bros. who came from Stoneswood House on Bacup Road. His wife Elizabeth had died in January 1851, and his youngest son William a month later, and he would have been grieving them while also having two young children to look after, Hannah and John Howarth. A familiar tale! But he had the money to not require a wife to look after the children so had no pressing need to remarry beyond appearances. The young wealthy widow up at Ewood would have been an attractive prospect though, maybe in more ways than one. Certainly Mary might have initially thought twice about a man eleven years her senior. Maybe the comfort of a gentlewoman’s life was all she knew and something she wanted to secure for herself – maybe she loved him! – all sorts of maybes we can’t speculate on led to the two marrying in October 1853.
This is where we learn her father’s identity, since a marriage certificate for her and James Haworth Wilson doesn’t exist online. A number of Stansfields witnessed the marriage, but were they aunts and uncles or her cousins? The newspapers deliver a final blow; she is named not as Mary Wilson, just “Mrs. Wilson”. It was a different time…
The couple lived together for the next 35 years, having one daughter together (Jessie), and enjoying their comfortable lives. Mary was active at Christ Church and made many expensive gifts to the church, including mosaics and furniture. In the 1880s a John Stansfeld of Leeds put together a massive, all-encompassing history of the Stansfield family for Col. Robert Stansfield, his relative and patron. A copy of it is in Todmorden Library (you can also view it at home on archive.org) and its scope is impressive. A thorough tome, you’d expect. Many wealthy local Tod folks subscribed to the publication to ensure they’d be delivered one at the first printing, including Abraham, presumably as a gift for Mary. But guess what…
…Mary isn’t in it.
Because naturally why would the book include illegitimate children, unless their existence was in the past and had some relevant to the story of the surname or continuation of a branch? But imagine being presented with the history of your family only to flip to the Stansfields of Ewood and Adamroyd and see that you aren’t included. That you didn’t exist in the printed history of your own family.
Abraham died in 1888 and Mary, Hannah and Jessie left Todmorden for Lytham to open a convalescent home in Abraham’s name. Mary was left with a £1000 a year bequest from his estate, with his three children receiving the remainder. He had left an estate valued at around £48,000 (£5.3m today) and this meant Mary was very comfortably set up between her annuity and Jessie’s share of the portion. Her and Jessie’s life post-Lytham, in the Lune Valley at the “Hermitage” in Caton, must have been idyllic.
When she died ten years later she was brought back to Christ Church to be buried with Abraham, and the papers spoke of her in the most glowing terms. Someone with a long memory even mentioned her first marriage all those years ago. And, of course, she was named as a niece of John Stansfield of Ewood Hall. But that’s all – like we said, some mysteries you just can’t solve with the evidence you have before you. The account of her burial which was published the week afterwards sounded beautiful; around her lead coffin, inside the wooden shell, were placed purple cloth and ferns, flowers, and mosses at her sides and at her feet. That’s the very last thing we learn about Mary, that she was someone who must have loved nature. Not just fancy ladylike gardening but real, wild plants.
So there’s Mary Stansfield for you – from riches to riches to riches, widely respected and loved, but erased from the official history of her family.
All the other Stansfields in this story, including her potential mothers Betty and Hannah, are buried in the private area of Christ Church. Interestingly her grandfather John was the very first person to be buried here at Christ Church in April 1825.