Rachel Rushby 1824 - 1864

Thanks to Ancestry publishing the West Yorkshire Parish records I’ve been able to delve further back into the family, Rushby-Almond.

I’ve written previously about Rachel Almond (great-great grandmother), the mother of my great-grandmother, Laura Ann Ashman.

Rachel’s mother, Rachel Rushby, (great-great-great- grandmother) died in childbirth the day Rachel Almond was born, on 10^thMay 1864.

Rachel Rushby was baptised the 10^th October 1824 at Batley, All Saints. This was the parish church for Morley at the time.

I think her father, George Rushby, married Mary Hardisty on 19^th April 1824. Her second sister, Martha, was born in 1827. Their mother appears to have died and I now wonder if she also died in childbirth with Martha. I can’t find a record of her death.

Rachel’s father then married Mary Megson from Ossett, Yorkshire on 2 January 1831. They went on to have more children. James, 1833; Betty Megson, 1835; George, 1838; Sarah, 1839; John, 1841; Mary, 1845; Jonathan, 1848 (?).

In 1841 Rachel was living with her grandparents, James and Mary Rushby, in Banks Hill, Morley. Her father and his wife, Mary, are living further down the road in Banks Hill with 6 children; Martha, James, Betty, George, Sarah and John.

1844; Rachel married Thomas Almond on November 4^th 1844 at St. Peter’s church, Morley. Her grandmother, Mary, died on 8^th August 1849

1851 they are living at 48, Bottoms, Morley. Thomas is a cloth dresser (employing 2 men). They have Mary Elizabeth, 5 and Eunice Ann, 2.

Her father, George, is living at 85 Banks Hill, Morley with his wife, Mary. George is a woollen cloth dresser, Mary is a wool boiler. Living with them are Betty Megson, 16 and George, 13, both working as woollen cloth weavers. John is 10 and and they have another child ,Mary, who is 6.  

Her grandfather, James Rushby, is living at 27 Bottoms with his grandson, James, a woollen cloth weaver.

Leeds Library and Information Service, Leeds City Council.

Chapel Hill from Bottoms

Grandfather James is listed as a retired cloth dresser; he died on 16^th March 1854.

Thomas Almond’s father, William, is living close by on Chapel Hill with his wife Elizabeth (born Hirst) William is a woollen factory overlooker, their daughter Emma, 20, is living with them working as a woollen cloth weaver. William Almond died in 1853. His grave is in St Peter’s churchyard to this day.

Gravestone Photographic Resource (GPR)

 

1861 Rachel and Thomas are living at 15 Howarth Place, Valley Street, Leeds. Thomas is a cloth dresser and they have Mary E. 15, an errand girl. Eunice Ann, 12, scholar and William, 9, Sarah Emma, 8, Hannah, 5, and Annetta, 2, who died in 1863 aged 4. Rachel’s father, George, is still in Morley, at 123 Banks Hill listed as a shopkeeper. Her half-sister, Betty Megson is living at Bottoms, Morley with her husband, William Lightowler.

Leeds Library and Information Service, Leeds City Council.

Bank Street Grocers

1864 Rachel aged 40, died 10^th May at 11 Valley Street. She had had 4 more children since 1861. George Walter, 1861; Elliot, 1862; Walter, 1863 and Rachel 1864.  Her daughter, Rachel, was born at 10, Valley Street, she died at 11, Valley Street, Leeds  of Parturition Syncope.

Rachel was buried in Morley on May 12^th. She is listed as resident of Hunslett, Leeds.

Thomas Almond married again in 1869. He married Ann Heslop from Hunslett, Leeds. She had married William Hawkshead in 1849 and was now a widow.

In 1871 they are living in Leeds at 2 Delaware Street with most of the children. Sarah Emma is working as a domestic servant in Morley. George Rushby is still at Banks Hill, Morley. George died in 1874.

In 1879 Thomas Almond died in Wakefield lunatic asylum and was buried at Morley on March 12^th 1879.

In 1880 Ann married again to William Lightowler who was the widower of Rachel’s half sister Betty Megson. 

In 1881, Rachel Almond, the youngest daughter is living in Morley with William Lightowler and his wife Ann. She is listed as niece to William Lightowler but she is, in fact, living with the woman who had been her mother since the age of 5 or 6. William Lightowler had been married to Betty Megson, her mother’s sister. Betty died in 1877.

This is the Rachel who married James Richard Ashman and went to Salford at the turn of the century. 

Rachel Almond

Rachel Almond, my great-great grandmother, (mother of Laura Ann Ashman, maternal great-grandmother) was born on the 10th May 1864 at 10 Valley Street, Leeds. Her mother Rachel (born Rushby) died on the same day, aged 39. This seems to suggest that she died in childbirth. Rachel Rushby married at the age of nineteen and Rachel was the ninth living child when she died.

They lived in Leeds, Yorkshire, which was the centre of the woollen trade. Her father Thomas Almond was born in Morley, Yorkshire in 1824. He married again in 1869 when Rachel was about five years old to Ann Hawkhead from Hunslet, Leeds who was aged 40 at the time of the marriage.

In the 1871 census Rachel is living with her father, a cloth presser, at 2 Delamare Street, Leeds along with his new wife and some of the older siblings. Thomas Almond is a cloth presser, his wife Ann, who is 42 years old, has no listed occupation. Mary Elizabeth, 35 years old and Eunice Ann, 32, are still living with the family and both working as cloth weavers. William is 19 years old and working as a plumber, Hannah is 15 and a dressmaker. Elliott is 9, Walter is 7 and Rachel is 6, all listed as scholars.

In the 1881 census Rachel is 15 years old, working as a cloth weaver, and boarding at Bank Street, Morley, Yorkshire. She is listed as niece of the household head, William Lightowler, aged 44, a quarry labourer from Wyke, near Bradford and his wife Ann, aged 50 from, Hunslet, Leeds along with their children, Martha, 17, a woollen cloth weaver, Tom, 13, an errand boy and William’s mother, Elizabeth Lightowler aged 73 born in Wyke, Bradford and listed as assistant.

Morley was a thriving mill town at this time, there is a lovely website here;

Morley

Rachel married James Richard Ashman on the 28^th October 1882 at St. Peter’s Church, Morley. James, who appeared to have called himself Richard was born in 1863.

In 1891 she is 26 years old and married to James Richard Ashman, aged 28. James is a worsted weaver and they are living at 30, Raynor Square, Morley. They have Laura Ann (born 1883) aged seven (my great-grandmother), Thomas W. aged four, James aged three and George H. aged one.

In 1901 they are living at 7 Turner Street, Salford.

Laura Ann is at home aged seventeen and three more children have been born. Ben, who is 10, Mary Elizabeth is seven. Mary was born in Morley in1894 and Rachel (Aunty Cissy) aged four, who was born in Manchester in 1897. They must have moved to Salford between 1894 and 1897. Richard is working as a camel hair worker, Laura Ann as a tailor (Mantle(?) maker) and James aged 13 is a (illegible) boy on the railway.

In 1911 they are living at 2 Myrtle Street, Cross Lane, Salford with James, Benjamin, Mary Elizabeth and Rachel. On this census we can see that they had one child who died so that explains why Thomas disappears from all further censuses after 1891 when he was four years old. Laura Ann is married now and living nearby in Trafford Road with her three young children. Laura, my grandmother is three years old.

My mother remembers visiting her great grandparents when they were living in Summerseat, near Ramsbottom. They must have moved there later in life. Aunty Cissy who was the youngest daughter took my mother on a bus and train to visit her great grandparents. Mum was born in 1934 but she doesn’t remember how old she was at the time, she was quite small but old enough to remember. She remembers going across a field to see some other family and the outside privy that they shared with other families. Her great grandfather, Richard, had whiskers that stung her face when he kissed her and Rachel was crying, Cissy said this was because she was so pleased to see her. Apparently Rachel had a bakery in Summerseat.

There is a nice website about Summerseat; Summerseat

This needs to be researched more. Mum says she drove through there a few years ago and all the land has been built on now.

Old map of Summerseat

Richard Ashman

My great-great grandfather James Richard Ashman is listed on the 1891 census as living in Morley, Yorkshire and born in Uppingham, Rutlandshire. On the 1901 census he is living in Salford and place of birth has a ditto sign below the neighbour who was born in Ireland. I thought this was a mistake and was convinced he was born in Rutlandshire (I even sent my brother, Matthew on a photo trip to Uppingham as it was only a few hundred miles out of his way when driving home from a job he was doing) until I saw the 1911 census which clearly states he was born in Ireland, written in his own hand. What intrigues me is why the clearly stated Uppingham birthplace when as far as I can tell he didn’t have anything to do with the place.

Thanks to a kind man in New Zealand I have now found the 1871 census and it is clear that he was born in Ireland although it’s not clear why. His family were born in fairly dispersed places. The next two brothers were born in Kent, the following one in Croydon and the younger two in Yorkshire where they were all living at the time of the 1871 census. It could be that the father, James Ashman was in the army, although he was a miner, aged 40, in Yorkshire at the time.

Apparently, their mother, Mary Ann died in 1874 and the younger children were brought up by a family in Salford. Richard and his brother Daniel went to the Morley area for work.

Richard is working in Morley in 1881 and he married Rachel Almond in 1882. My great- grandmother Laura Ann Ashman was born in 1883. There are many photos and lots of memories of this handsome, jolly, enterprising woman. In fact, one of my uncles has published a novel about her husband's time in WW1 and the family left behind in Salford. Made in Myrtle Street by B.A. Lightfoot, Ranelagh books 2009 http://www.ranelaghbooks.co.uk/

Laura Ann was born in Morley but by 1901 they had moved over to Salford as so many people did at the beginning of the century. She married Edward Clunie and the rest, they say, is history.

Children of the Industrial Revolution 2

Before they all ended up in Salford it seems lots of our family lived in Ancoats, Manchester.

What is truly amazing is how some of our ancestors lived so close to each other in the 1850s and 1860s yet it would take another 100 years before these families were joined together by the marriage of my mother and father who also met each other when they lived in adjoining streets although these streets were some miles and many decades distant from this district.

In 1851 Mary Callaghan, my great-great-great grandmother (she was Hannah Keogh, grandma Nally’s great-grandmother) was living in the area around New Islington, Pott Street, she was widowed by the age of 36 and left with five children to care for alone. She was Irish, born in 1815 , her eldest daughter Mary was born in Ireland in 1833 and the younger ones were born in Manchester. Her daughter Mary Callaghan married Laurence Nolan who was also born in Ireland. It seems they were born in Westmeath and must have emmigrated during the potato famine. They all lived in the same street ten years later. In the next decade they moved to Salford and their daughter Ellen Nolan married Matthew Keogh (whose father Daniel Keogh was born in Ireland) they brought Hannah Keogh into this world. Hannah Keogh (who married Arthur McNally) was the dearly beloved mother of my dearly beloved father who married his dearly beloved wife, my mother.

In 1851 my mother’s mother’s families were living not too many streets away in much the same conditions. George Clunie was living at 49 Portugal street, his son James Clunie’s future wife Martha Regan was living with her Irish born father, John Regan, a street sweeper and her capmaker mother, Sarah, not so far away on the other side of what was then St George’s road, now Rochdale Road.

By 1861 the Clunies had moved a few doors down Portugal Street to number 51. Martha’s father John and his family were nearby in Loom street. Martha and James would marry and give birth to Edward Clunie who married Laura Ann Ashman the parents of our beloved grandma Laura Armstrong (born Clunie).

Meanwhile, not too far away on the other side of the river Irk, Agnes Armstrong, born in Scotland and recently widowed was living at 64 Stocks Street with her two sons who had been born in Rochdale a few years earlier. Her younger son James Charles Armstrong would marrry Sarah Myers to produce Charles James Armstrong who married Annie Hodkinson to give birth to James Edward Armstrong, our grandad Jim, who married our dearly beloved grandmother Laura Clunie.

Sarah Myers was the daughter of Robert Myers and Jemima Baxter. Robert Myers marrried Jemima Baxter in 1853 but it seems they had already had a few children born before they married. Robert Myers was a pawnbroker at 294 Deansgate which is certainly in a pretty different category to the rest of the workers in this family.

Ancoats was the original ‘Cottonopolis’. The area described by Frederich Engels in his 1845 ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ the work of a 24-year-old German middle-class boy, who incredibly rejected all his bougeoise background to eventually team up with Karl Marx and start one of the most influential movements in history.

His impassioned descriptions of the slum living conditions of the workers in this area make for depressing reading. The exact areas he describes can be pinpointed on the map as dwelling places of our family. The most surprising thing about this work is the chapter on Irish immigration, which he begins by saying is an attempt to discover the causes and effects of this immigration. The analysis of causes is notable for its complete absence and the analysis of effects turns into a surprisingly rascist diatribe comparing the Irish to savages.Their southern facile character is used to living in filth, they only know potatoes and drunkeness. What does such a race need higher wages for he asks. They live with their pigs as Arabs live with their horses. They are specifically responsible for spreading the habit of going about with no shoes on their feet and generally responsible for bringing down the level of civilization of the English working class.

This is particularly upseting as Laurence Nolan is listed as an engine driver, which as I understand from other readings, was a job that was pretty much on a par with an airline pilot these days.

The most poignant irony is that much of these same living and working conditions can be seen today in 2010, in modern day China (and other cities of what we quaintly call the developing world). What we now call globalisation is pretty much the same as what one hundred and fifty years ago was called industrialisation and capitalism. Now it is carried out under the auspices of a system called communism which was sparked by this eager, young German boy, who, apalled at the conditons of the working class in Manchester, teamed up with a fellow German, Karl Marx, to create a movement that was meant to improve their condition.

In 1841 the life expectancy in Manchester was 26.6 years.