Sarah Butterfield - discovering my distant cousin lived in Grimethorpe in 1901 !

It will be obvious from the title of my blog that I live in Barnsley, but you may have wondered why I have a sailing ship on the header as well as an old view of our street.  Many of my own ancestors, who were mostly from Sunderland, Newcastle, and parts of Cumbria were involved with ships and sailing in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  So when I discovered a new mariner in my extended family yesterday my interest was caught straight away.  It may take me more than one blog post to tell this story, so I'll start at the beginning.

I had been contacted by a reader of one of my blog posts who is 'kind of' related to me via marriage.  He had sent me some of his family information and hoped that it would be of use to me filling in a few more details about one of my family lines.  Back in April 2013 I wrote two posts about the Batemans and the Butterfields who were originally from the Bradford area but who moved up to Durham for a time in the mid 19th century.  One man, my 4x great grandfather William Bateman, stayed in Durham but the rest of his family seem to have drifted back to the Bradford and Huddersfield area over the following 20 years.

Draft tree for Sarah Butterfield's children

William's niece, Sarah Butterfield, was born in Bradford in 1836.  By the time the family moved up to Durham she already had one illegitimate son, William Henry Butterfield, also born in Bradford, and while living in North Bitchburn, Durham in 1859, she had a second child out of wedlock, John Thomas Butterfield.  That makes him my second cousin four times removed. Remember him, he is important for the story of the connection to the new mariner!

Sarah marries a William Fenton a few months later which suggests he could be John Thomas' father, or maybe just a chap who was kind enough to take on two step-sons and a wife of proven fertility. They have at least four more children together (see left) whose birthplaces seem to demonstrate the timeline and direction of Sarah's return to Yorkshire.

Joseph Fenton was born in Crook in Durham (the same place my own grandfather was born in 1905 which isn't surprising as Grandad Hutton was descended from William Bateman) in around 1867.  Herbert Enoch Fenton was born on the outskirts of Wakefield in 1870, and the last two children Priscilla and Ernest were born in Gildersome, which lies between Leeds and Bradford.

Oddly the census returns tell a slightly different story. In 1861 Sarah, although listed under her married name of Fenton, is living with her parents in Gildersome! Her two illegitimate sons are listed as the grandsons of Miles Butterfield, the head of the household and Sarah's father.  In 1871 Sarah and William Fenton are back together along with William, John, Joseph and Herbert, who are all listed as William's sons.  To my surprise the family is in Royston, just a few miles from Barnsley! William Fenton is a coal miner and the two older boys are both 'Labourer in coal mine'.  Somewhere along the line Sarah has returned to Durham, met up with William Fenton again and has their eldest son in Crook nearly seven years after their marriage. Then the family move down to Yorkshire together. I double checked on the new GRO online birth indexes which give mother's maiden name right back to the start of registration in 1837, but I can find no children born to the couple (I searched on Fenton, mmn Butterfield from 1858 to 1870) before Joseph in the third quarter of 1866.  

I can't imagine what was going on, it seems very strange to marry someone in 1859 and live apart for six or seven years ... maybe Sarah was just visiting her parents in 1861, but if that was the case why no children with William until 1866, it's not as if Sarah had any problem getting pregnant as far as we can tell!

Herbert Fenton's GRO birth index entry showing mmn Butterfield

Herbert Fenton was registered in the Hemsworth Registration District in 1870, which I expected, as his place of birth generally given as Nostell or Walton in Yorkshire. Priscilla Cassandra Emily (!) is registered in Bramley in 1873, this is the RD which covers Gildersome. Ernest is registered in Wakefield in 1876. I did have to tweek the dates on my family tree once I had confirmed these births as calculating the children's ages from the census returns had given me dates a year or so out.

As I had expected from what I already knew of the Butterfield family I can find no baptisms and only a couple of marriages for any of Sarah's children on Ancestry in the West Yorkshire Parish Records.  The Butterfields tended towards Non-Conformity in their worship and few of those vital records are available online yet.

The Fenton family in the 1881 census in Cumberland, from Ancestry

I was even more surprised at the address for the family in the 1881 census, the one with the slightly misleading ages for the children shown above.  They are living at Crosby Villas, Crosscannonby, near Cockermouth in Cumberland, which has taken us back to another area from which a branch of my own family originate.  This is about 150 miles from their last address in Royston, near Barnsley. William Fenton is still a Coal Miner, it says 'Do' for ditto here and I've cut off the family above, sorry.  Sarah's two older sons are no longer living with them.  

I knew that William Henry Butterfield had married in 1873 and that by 1881 he had at least two children with Elizabeth (nee Abbott).  When I searched for them in the census I found Elizabeth with the children in Gildersome living at the same address as a lady I assume is her widowed mother, Sarah Abbott aged 45.  William is not at home and I can't find him in the 1881 census at all. William and Elizabeth don't have another child together until late 1884 in Leeds which does make me a little suspicious, but in 1891 the family is all together again living in Hunslet, just south of Leeds.  Sadly following the births of three more children, making eight in total, Elizabeth dies in 1898.  The siblings are living together without parents in 1901, with sister Florence as the head of the household. William has vanished again but turns up in 1905 when he is buried at Gildersome alongside his wife. 

The widowed Sarah Fenton and family in Morley in 1891, from Ancestry

Meanwhile Sarah Fenton (nee Butterfield) is having her own turn of bad luck as William Fenton dies somewhere between 1881 and 1891.  She is living in Morley, near Leeds in 1891 as a widow with her three younger children, Herbert, Priscilla (who is now going by Emily) and Ernest. She has a Grocery and Confectionery shop, maybe at home, 16 Albert Road, and all three children are working and no doubt contributing money to the family income. I do like the idea of a little shop, I guess there might be some way of finding out how long she had the business, maybe from the Electoral Rolls or the rate books.  But I'd have to go to Morley to find out which might be a bit far for me these days. 

Snip from the 1929 Godfrey map of Grimethorpe

By 1901 Sarah has moved again and here is where she gets really local to me. She and a 12 year old grand-daughter, Ethel Butterfield, one of William Henry's brood, are living at Turners Row in Grimethorpe. This appears to have been next to the Grimethorpe Hotel (sadly now demolished) in the centre of the village.  They also have four lodgers living with them, all coal miners, reflecting the new development of the area as collieries were sunk. According to the blurb on the back of my copy of the 1929 Alan Godfrey map of Grimethorpe in 1901 the village was so new that three of the six streets were only known as 'One Street', 'Two Street' and 'Three Street'. The census runs from Joseph Street, past the Post Office and the Grimethorpe Hotel into Turners Row which runs for four pages before turning into Freeman's Square. Maybe someone more local than me can place the address more precisely? By 1929 the village was apparently four times the size and on my map I can see the new estates to the north and south of the area shown above.

Sarah's Fenton children have married by now, but most of the family seems to like to live near her and each other. In 1891 her eldest son Joseph, who married an Irish girl called Rosina in Cumberland in 1888, was living with his wife in Aspatria about five miles from where his parents had lived in 1881. However by 1901 the pair and their five children have moved to Kinsley, just north of Hemsworth, just five miles from his mum in Grimethorpe. Judging by the birthplaces of their children they passed through Morley along the way.

Herbert Enoch Fenton married Sarah Annie in 1900 somewhere in the Dewsbury area and is living on Shaftsbury Terrace in Hemsworth in 1901, half a mile nearer his mum than his brother! Priscilla or Emily married Percy Lumsden in 1893 in Morley in one of the few Church of England ceremonies the family seem to partake in. From the looks of the links on Ancestry Percy and Priscilla emigrate to New Zealand - sadly I only have a UK subscription so I can't look those records up. Finally Ernest who married Jane in Morley in 1898 is living in Manston near Leeds in 1901 but has moved to ... [de de, de duh! 'fanfare'] ... Grimethorpe by 1911!

In the most recent census we can access, 1911, now aged 75, my cousin Sarah, having enjoyed a brief marriage with a gentleman called Edwin Bashforth between October 1901 and his death in the second quarter of 1910, is living with her son Herbert in South Elmsall.  He is a Fish and Potato Fryer working on his own account at 207 Dearne Street.  He is sufficiently well off to have a domestic servant living in.

Burial record for Sarah Bashforth, formerly Fenton, nee Butterfield

Sarah dies on 25 February 1915 at Westfield Road, Hemsworth aged 78.  I was able to find her burial record on the Wakefield Council's brilliant website.  It might not be fully indexed but it is completely free!  

There must be Fentons still around here who are descended from Sarah and her children.  They will be my very distant cousins, what a strange thought!  One of Herbert's children, Clement Enoch Fenton, aged seven in the 1911 census, was even born in Cudworth where we now live.  It's a very, very small world.

Oh, and if you were wondering what had happened to John Thomas Butterfield, whom we left in 1871 in Royston, you'll have to wait for my next post, this one is quite long enough for now.

Thank you for reading.






 

My Flip Pal Mobile Scanner has arrived and has been tested

And the OH's tea was a bit late ...

When I got home from the Archives this afternoon I found one of those red cards from the postman through the door to say he'd tried to deliver three parcels but that I hadn't been in.  Luckily in Cudworth the parcels are initially returned to the local post office so I dashed up there with my proof of identity and the red card hoping and praying the parcel(s) were still there.

They were, and after a little discussion as to whether they could actually let me have them because one had a bar code on it to prove it had been delivered and they didn't have the necessary technology to scan it, they finally did let me take them away. *sigh of relief*

One was my parcel of Amazon goodies, part of my Great British Beer Festival leaving present, one was my Samsung tablet charger being returned by the hotel in London where I had foolishly left it plugged in next to the kettle a week ago (I had sent them a postage paid padded bag) and the one that had to be signed for was my Flip Pal Mobile Scanner, the biggest and most long awaited part of my present.  Given that this had been bought whilst in London two weeks ago on behalf of my GBBF friends by my daughter and soon-to-be son-in-law from My History in Rotherham the poor thing has so far been to Gloucester (wrongly delivered to son-in-law's home address), and then Leicester (daughter's house), and all the way back to Barnsley so I had, of course, to get it out of the box immediately and make sure it was working ... I really had to, I hadn't got any choice had I?

The Flip Pal Mobile Scanner

The scanner comes with batteries (4x AA) already installed, you just have to pull out a plastic tab to connect them up.  The lid was held down with some green tape which easily peeled away and the SD card was also already in the machine.  The blurb - the Quick Start Guide - said the card was 2Gb, but when I looked it was a 4Gb one instead, bonus!

Flip Pal side view showing card slot, green scan button and power button

I can see why they've made the power button a bit harder to use, you have to slide it forward hold a split second and then let go, it makes it impossible for you to press it by mistake when you are going for the big green scanner button.

Flip Pal open next to one of my new books

The Flip Pal is 10" by 6.5" (about 24x16cm) and about an inch thick (2.5cm).  It is very light and yet doesn't feel fragile.  You can scan things in the 'normal' way by putting them on the platen, closing the lid and pressing the green button.  An image of the item you are scanning comes up on the little screen on the right so you know it has worked.  

The little screen on the Flip Pal just after turning on (left) and after a scan (right)

The menu on the screen can be navigated using the buttons, you get the choice of 300dpi or 600dpi scans and a 1, 2 or 10 minute delay before the machine powers down automatically to save battery power.  There are also some simple instructions, but a full User Guide can be found on the SD card included when you put it in your computer.

Needless to say I had a go before reading anything but the Quick Start Guide - I wanted to try out the supplied software that stitches images together if the thing you are scanning is larger than the device.

Readying the Flip Pal for scanning in situ or large objects

First you have to remove the lid - this is a bit scary the first time, but actually it's fairly simple, there are a couple of little tabs to the right and left of what they call the photo guide, that's the plastic strip to the top of the glass screen in the picture of the Flip Pal with its lid up two pictures back.  The three slots you can see in the picture above are where three tabs click into place to hold the lid on.

Now this is where it Flips ...

Flip Pal scanning part of a book cover

You have to turn the scanner over and position it over the item to be scanned.  It took four scans to cover this book cover image - you have to overlap the scans by about a inch so the software can do its business.  It doesn't matter if you don't get the scanner dead straight each time - the software can sort that out too.

It looks a bit funny watching the scanner work, not a thing we are used to seeing.

Being able to see straight through the scanner means you can also easily scan pictures in books or photos in albums without struggling to get the book or album onto the platen of a flatbed scanner and lining up the picture, and of course you can scan things that are larger than A4! 

Oooh! Maps!

When I had made the four scans I turned off the scanner and removed the SD card - it just pops out when you press it.  The Flip Pal comes with a little card reader device so you just put it in that and plug that in any available USB port on your computer.

Removing the SD card from Flip Pal, and using the supplied card reader with my laptop

The SD card and reader are automatically detected.  I copied the software to my PC for peace of mind, but you can run the FlipPal Easy Stitch software from the card.

Running Flip Pal Easy Stitch the software automatically detects the scans available

You just select the scans you want to combine into one image, either by drawing a box around them or by CTRL and clicking each one, then click Open.  A progress pop up appears and a few seconds later (I found two images were processed faster than four, but that does make sense) the finished image opens on your screen in your default picture viewer, in my case Windows Photo Viewer.  


Finished processed image

The image of the book cover is flawless, I certainly can't see the join between the four images from which it is made.

The black bits around the edges are a small cause for concern, it should be 'wood grain' (the top of my chest of drawers in my window).  I can only assume that sometimes too much light comes in around the edge when the scanner is raised off the background surface and this causes the black effect.  But as I am actually only after the book cover image I can soon crop the image down in Photoshop.

If you were taking a scan of a photo in an album you would want to crop the background anyway so I can't see this is a problem, plus a photo is a lot flatter than a book!




Incidentally the book shown was another part of my GBBF leaving present.  It is Kate Tiller's recent book about War Memorials and it is available from the British Association for Local History.

I was so busy playing with my new shiny toy that the OH came in from work and I hadn't even started his tea.  Sorry love.  After tea I just had to show him how it worked and successfully scanned a picture of a pub in two parts from the most recent issue of CAMRA's Beer magazine.  I've cropped the picture and tweeked the contrast - well it was from a matt paper magazine, but again you just can't see the join between the images - at all.

Cheers!

The Black Bull pub in Coniston, home to the Award winning Coniston beers (from BEER Autumn 2013)

Day's Croft, Monk Bretton, Barnsley - it's not there now, the ground's all flat ...

When I was little one of my favourite songs was the Hole in the Ground by Bernard Cribbins. Towards the very end of the song he sings, "Hole in the ground, so big and sort of round it was, it's not there now, the ground's all flat, and beneath it is the man in the bowler hat," which obviously as a bloodthirsty child I thought was justice for bothering a man in his gainful employment leaning on his shovel!

Day's Croft wasn't a big round hole, but it wasn't far away from one ... Monk Bretton Colliery, and neither it nor Day's Croft are there now!  There is a grassy expanse sloping down from Monk Bretton to Lundwood, with a few trees and scrubby bushes where dozens of miners and their families used to live.

1930s map of Day's Croft and Monk Bretton Colliery (from Old Maps)

From this map snip I don't think that you would guess there were nearly forty little houses in Day's Croft, yet in the 1911 census summary book I can find a listing for thirty-two properties and there are some gaps in the numbering.  Numbers 1-3 and 6-7 are not occupied or not identified by number anyway.  Interestingly number 30 was Mr Laycock's shop which suggests the street was probably quite self-sufficient.  The summary books are an easy way to see the numbers of people living in an area.  Hard to believe but one of these little houses contained thirteen people on census night and two others each held ten people, including the house of one of the OH's relatives.

The colliery was in existence in 1880 according to a list on Rootsweb, but in the earliest map available, from the 1850s, the canal bridge labelled Croft Bridge on the 1930s map above is adjacent to the Bleach Croft, no doubt where it got its name.  There is no colliery and no row of houses on the road between the Croft Bridge and the Bleachworks.

Monk Bretton and the area of the Bleachcroft nearby (from Old Maps)

Searching the burial records for Monk Bretton church I can find no burials from Day's Croft before 1886.  There are 112 burials between 1886 and 1948 (when the list I have ends) with an address in Day's Croft and nearly half of them (51) are children under five years old.  Given this frequency of children dying in the area it does suggest that this is evidence that the houses were built no earlier than 1885 or 1886. 


Sheffield Daily Telegraph Thursday 17 December 1903 (from Find My Past - Newspapers)

This newspaper cutting from 1903 states that George Wharam had worked at the colliery for fifteen years, so that takes us back to 1888, and that he occupied the house "under the colliery company".  So the houses were owned by the colliery ...

The earliest mention I have for the address in the OH's family tree is in 1900 when George Johnson jnr marries from his father George snr's home at 11 Day's Croft.  George marries Elizabeth Ann Jobling, the OH's half 3x great aunt and another Johnson, George's sister Ellen marries Elizabeth Ann's younger brother Richard Loveland Jobling six years later ... introduced through their siblings maybe?  There must have been a shortage of suitable houses in the area because in 1911 Richard Jobling, his wife and two children are living with George snr and six members of his family at 11 Day's Croft.  This is a total of ten people in a house, which according to the census, has five rooms (not counting the kitchen). 

The north east of Barnsley in 1924 showing Monk Bretton and Cudworth
(from the Bartholomew Half Inch Maps at the National Library of Scotland)

In 1891 George Johnson snr, occupation Coal Miner, and his family were living in Monk Bretton itself and eight or ten years prior to that, based on the birth places of the older children, they had lived in Cudworth.  It is less than a mile and a half from Cudworth to the colliery site, but I'm sure that the shorter walk from Day's Croft was welcomed.  On the small scale location map I have included above there isn't even a blip on the map for Day's Croft, however the Colliery is marked very near to Monk Bretton railway station.

What is even more interesting is that both George snr and his wife Ann Kitchen, who married in 1877 in Royston, are from the North West of England, the area which is now Cumbria.  George is from Penrith and Ann from Appleby which are no more than 14 miles distant from each other.  Did many families move from that area to Barnsley to work in the coal mines in the 1870s?  Did they socialise with each other because of their shared Cumberland/Westmoreland heritage?  The Kitchen family were still in Cumberland in 1861 but Ann's eldest sister, Alice, marries in the Barnsley district in 1869, so they have arrived in the area by then.  George Johnson appears to arrive between 1871 and 1877, alone.

As you can see on the 1930s map the new estates at Lundwood were appearing, semi detached houses, built no more than 12 to an acre in the Garden City style, each with its own garden on curving roads and cul-de-sacs.  I expect the families from Day's Croft watched over the fields as these houses were put up and hoped(?) they would be able to get one.  Certainly by the 1960s, judging by the maps again, there were no buildings of any kind left on the site of Day's Croft.

I can find no pictures of Day's Croft on the Barnsley Council's Yococo Image database online, and putting Day's Croft into the images search on Google brings back some of my own blog posts!

There may be more information in the Archives about Day's Croft, possibly in the records of the colliery ... or photographs that haven't made it to Yococo yet.  We can only hope.  It would be nice to see what these houses, which were home to some very large families in 1911, actually looked like.

Moderate - not a description but an unusual surname

A couple days ago I posted an item about digitising newspapers and one of my examples concerned the tragic death of Jeremiah Moderate aged sixteen who was knocked down by a train in the course of his duties as a telegraph clerk.  It occurred to me that despite occasional side references like this and one article about Uncle Joe Moderate quite some time ago I have hardly touched on the history of my most unusual family name.

The Gibson Family after 1918

This is a picture of my grandmother, the small girl stood in the middle, her parents and brother.  It must have been taken after 1918 because grandma is wearing the locket that had belonged to her next oldest sister Winnie who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 aged just seventeen.  My grandma was Doris Gibson, born 1907 in Wallsend, Northumberland, so she is about eleven or twelve in this photo.  Her father was Thomas Harle Gibson, born 1864 in Longbenton, Northumberland and her mother was Mary Jane (maiden name Moderate) born 1865 in Carlisle, Cumberland.  Robert Ernest Gibson, her brother, was born in 1897 in Hebburn, Durham and had served in the First World War losing a leg my mother says. 

Thomas and Mary Jane had eight children in total, that I know of, my grandmother being the youngest.  Somewhere I have a piece of that good quality pinky purple writing paper that my grandma preferred with a list of all the birthdays for her immediate family ... I don't know exactly when I found out that great-grandma Gibson's maiden name was Moderate, but it was something I knew before I started researching family history seriously. 

In fact this very name is probably the reason I did start. 

When asked by my then partner's mother (AM) many years ago what family names I knew of I mentioned Moderate along with Fiddler, Bunn and some others.  She leapt upon Moderate commenting that it was a very, very unusual name and well worth researching.  She lent me some Open University books from a course she had just completed (DA301, Studying Family and Community History: 19th and 20th Centuries) a newish course in the mid 1990s.  I was hooked ...

All my researches point to the English Moderates being descended from just one man, John Moderate born around 1777, a mariner, who died in January 1825 in Maryport, Cumberland.

Map of the northern part of the Irish Sea (from Google Maps)

Since then I have found other families with the Moderate name in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Donaghadee near Bangor in Northern Ireland (the extreme east coast of Ireland) and in Kirkmaiden, in the Rhinns of Galloway (the extreme west of Scotland), Ballantrae (again the western coast of Scotland) and another in Workington, Cumberland, just down the western coast of England from Maryport.  The distribution of these families around the fairly tight area depicted on my map snip above still suggests a common root to me.  After all, a friend from Northern Ireland once told me that Irish emigrants to Scotland used to row back to Ireland for church services, so they can't have considered a bit of sea a barrier to social activity.
 
John Moderate married a local girl, Jane Ritson, in Crosscanonby, just north of Maryport, in 1804.  They had four children, but only one, the first Jeremiah Moderate, born in 1810 in Maryport, survived to have a family of his own.  With John dying well before even the 1841 census I have no way of determining his place of origin.  When he marries Jane in 1804 one of the witnesses appears to be a William Moderate, so he wasn't alone in England at that point, however the only further hits for a William are two children in Workington in 1809 and 1811 to himself and his wife Grace.  Then William, Grace and their family disappear from the English records.  Do they die, return to their place of origin, be it Ireland or Scotland or emigrate?  Another mystery.

John gives his occupation consistently as Mariner at his marriage and the baptisms and burials of his children.  However I am aware of no records for sailors that start as far back as the first couple of decades of the 19th century.  Registers of Merchant Seamen don't commence until 1835.  So that's another dead end.

Various theories over the past twenty years have suggested that the name comes from the idea of Moderators in the Scottish church or that the family may have been immigrants from France whose name was mis-transcribed by an English clergyman or other official.  I'm tending towards a seafaring family from Ireland who spread outwards from there.  Before that, who knows?

When I compiled a list of the Moderates in the English telephone book in 1996 I got no more than eighteen different addresses, plus a couple of strays in Aberdeen, Scotland and Bangor, County Down, Ireland.  Writing to all the English hits I received sufficient replies to link each and every one of the eighteen to each other and all of them back to John Moderate in Maryport in 1804.

I was very pleased to receive the replies to my letters all those years ago (seventeen years have since passed!) and I hope I managed to interest one or two of my distant relatives in their own family history.  I was sent dates and names and in one memorable package an original indenture for a great-great uncle on his apprenticeship to the Co-op in Walker, Northumberland in 1880.  Needless to say I copied that precious document to the best of my ability at the time and carefully returned it to its owner.  Thank you so much for that.  I even had a phone call in 1997 from a relative in Northumberland who already appreciated her Moderate legacy to the extent of preserving the name as her middle name after her marriage.  I reunited my grandmother with her cousin Neville, whom she hadn't seen since he was a toddler - he and my mum kept in touch until his death only a few years ago.

Thanks to one and all for all your help back then - I'm sorry I let the exchange of letters dwindle when I had to go back to full time work - if anyone even vaguely Moderate related would like to get in touch again I'm still here and I have time on my hands once more!