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Susannah
RATCLIFFE was something of a puzzle. When she married
Jeremiah RHODES on
14 November 1887, she did not give any details of her father,
suggesting that she was illegitimate. Nothing strange in
that, except that I had been unable to find any record of
her birth to confirm the fact..
One clue included in her marriage
details was that one of the witnesses was James
RATCLIFFE. Searching the 1881
census, he appears with his wife and two children staying
as 'visitors' at Lane End, Mottram, the home of John
GREENWOOD and his family. His daughter, Susannah,
at the age of 13 matches the details expected for Susannah
RATCLIFFE. Also there was James RATCLIFFE who I assumed
must be Jane's brother. However, the 1871
census confuses the issue.
Still at Lane End, Mottram, Jane is then Jane
GREENWOOD, the wife of John
HIGGINBOTTOM! Their children are Susana
(sic) and James GREENWOOD
of the right ages for my RATCLIFFEs. Each had 'R' as their
middle initial and I suspected that this stood for RATCLIFFE
and that both were Jane's
illegitimate children. This was confirmed by Susannah's
birth certficate. The remarkable thing is that there was
11 years difference in their ages.
So why the GREENWOOD/HIGGINBOTTOM anomoly? Checking the
Cheshire BMD
website shows that a John H GREENWOOD
married Jane RATCLIFFE at Old
St George, Stalybridge in 1870. Obtaining the marriage
certificate proved my guess that the initial 'H' in John's
name stood for HIGGINBOTTOM and that his name was incorrectly
recorded by the enumerator. The certificate also told me
that Jane's father's
name was James.
The other nugget of information from the 1871
census is that boarding with John and Jane were Charles
RATCLIFFE, his wife and two children. Both Jane
and Charles gave their place
of birth as what looks like Burshedge, Yorkshire, as their
place of birth, suggesting a family connection, possibly
siblings.
Going back to the 1861 census,
Jane is found living
on Mottram Road with her mother, Susannah,
her son James and Margaret
CLAYTON, Susannah's grand-daughter.
Jane gives her place
of birth as Denby, Yorkshire, (Pensitone) while her mother
names Royston-in-Barnsley. Checking Multimap,
both places are close to each other, north
east and north west of Barnsley. Also that there is
an area called Birds
Edge, presumably the 'Burshedge' referred to in 1871.
Searching the IGI
showed that James RATCLIFFE had
married Susannah WHITE on 5 December
1825 at St Mary's, Barnsley. They had five children, baptised
at St John
the Baptist church, Denby, including Jane
and Charles. It also appears
that their mother, Susanna, was the only child of John
WHITE and Sarah SMITH who
married in Royston in 1793. I have not yet found likely
parents for James RATCLIFFE.
How and when the family moved from Yorskhire to Mottram
isn't yet clear. I have not been able to find them on the
1851 census which suggests they crossed the Pennines between
then and 1861. Interestingly, the Margaret CLAYTON mentioned
above is the daughter of Sarah Anne
RATLIFFE and Joseph CLAYTON
who married in Huddersfield in 1848 and given that the child's
birthplace is given as Mottram, it suggests that the this
couple at least had moved there quite recently.
Thanks to the Yorksgen list, I have found one census reference
to James RATCLIFFE.in 1841, at Birds
Edge, as expected. Susannah
says that she is married in 1861, rather than widowed, but
I have yet to find her husband.
So, to return to the original
puzzle, Jane RATCLIFFE who later
married John GREENWOOD already
had two illegitimate children. He was certainly too young
to be James' father who was only ten years younger than
his adoptive dad. Whether he was Susannah's father is likely
to prove more difficult to confirm! However, she obviously
regarded him as such, as demonstrated by naming her youngest
son John Greenwood RHODES. |
