READER STORY
Julie Aspin was astounded when she uncovered a badly behaved ancestor who lied, stole and sold bad meat – all against the backdrop of the Lancashire Cotton Famine. Claire Vaughan finds out more
How Julie Aspin found an ancestor who lied, stole and sold ‘bad meat’
any family historians expose black sheep or two during the course of their research, but Julie Aspin was truly shocked at the antics of one of her forebears and what eventually became of him. However, she believes that one of his crimes (along with the generosity of a stranger) saved his descendants from following in his footsteps…
For Julie, genealogy is a long-standing passion. “Back in 1981, I wanted to go to university to do history, but I failed my A-levels. I had time on my hands, so I thought I’d do some of my own history!” she says. “I’d always wanted to know more about my Dad’s father, Richard Greenwood Parker, who died when my Dad was five, so he never really knew him.” It was in researching her grandfather that Julie discovered black sheep Isaac, along with a mystery man without whom things would have been very different for the Parker family.
Learning and teaching
Julie eventually got to do a degree and put her family history to one side until the 1901 census was released in 2003. At the time she was working for Lancashire Adult Learning. “When the first episode of Who Do You Think You Are? aired in 2004 with Bill Oddie, we recognised that there’d be a surge in people wanting to do family history, so I started teaching courses. I taught people how to trace their genealogy for 10 years,” she says.
Back on the case with her own family, Julie discovered that Richard Greenwood Parker was one of five children and the only one with a middle name. Julie’s Dad, Gerard, had always been proud of his father’s distinguished-sounding moniker, but where did the name Greenwood come from? “We assumed – which you should never do – that it was Richard’s mother’s maiden name, but when I was searching I couldn’t find her because she wasn’t called Greenwood at all – she was actually called King.”
With the few clues she had, Julie tried researching Richard’s parents. “His father was Joseph Parker (1858–1909) – we knew that as we’d seen his grave, but we couldn’t find him on the census for 1871,” she says.
Eventually she managed to find Joseph on the 1861 census, living with his parents Isaac and Winifred and his siblings James, Robert, Ellen and Mary. This information helped her find 13-year-old Joseph in 1871, living with his older sister Ellen in Livesey in Blackburn – with a Richard and Elizabeth Greenwood.
It was a real eureka moment: “When the name Greenwood came up I thought, ‘Oh wow!’. I did wonder for a moment whether Elizabeth was the children’s mother and Richard was the stepfather, but it was nothing like that.”
“This census entry raised all sorts of questions,” says Julie. “Where had Isaac and Winifred gone? Where were the other siblings? And most importantly, who was Richard Greenwood? I haven’t yet discovered who he was, but ultimately it would seem that he and his wife took in these two children who’d been abandoned or orphaned. If they hadn’t, Joseph and Ellen would have been in the workhouse, apprenticed to the parish, or maybe sent abroad to work.”
Julie found the other children – the older ones working and Mary living with another family member. She then set about finding out what had happened to Isaac and Winifred – looking into their backgrounds for hints. Isaac (b1830 in Ribchester) and Winifred Sumner (b1828 in Chipping) had married in September 1851, according to their marriage certificate. Isaac worked as a butcher and brewer. She formed a theory about what had happened: “My guess was that he’d abandoned his family.” And sure enough, she eventually tracked him down to Manchester. “It took me a while to confirm it was him, but it all matched.” He was living with
It seems that the Greenwoods took in two children who’d been abandoned or orphaned
his second wife Sarah and their two sons James and Albert, aged six and seven.
With her knowledge of history, Julie was well aware of the backdrop to the Parkers’ lives. “1861–1865 was the time of the Lancashire Cotton Famine,” she explains. “I’d studied the famine on my degree from the political and economic point of view. Social history was a bit sniffed at in those days, but we learned that people were the building blocks of history. Blackburn was a thriving, growing industrial town, but across the Atlantic in the USA, war was being waged – North against South, Confederates against Yankees – to put an end to slavery. The American ports were blockaded and soon cotton supplies to Lancashire ceased, bringing hardship, poverty, starvation, disease and death to the hard-working people of Lancashire.”
At the time of the 1861 census, the Parkers seemed to be fairly affluent. Isaac and Winifred had five children. They ran a butcher’s and had a servant who probably helped out in the shop too. “The Cotton Famine took its toll on ordinary families like Isaac’s,” says Julie. The people of Blackburn slipped into poverty overnight, living in empty rooms, with very little food. “The cotton manufacturers, the employers, were quite generous,” says Julie, “They provided food and soup kitchens. It was strange to imagine Isaac in the middle of all that.”
Left in the lurch?
Julie wondered whether Isaac had really abandoned his family or whether, with times so hard in Blackburn, he’d just gone to see if he could find work in Manchester. “Perhaps his intentions were initially good, but he got to the city and met somebody else. We’ll never know, but when his younger daughter married, although he’d been gone 20 years, she still named him as her father on her marriage certificate. Maybe he still had some contact with them.” But what about Winifred? More digging revealed her sad fate – she died of syphilis in 1865 aged just 36. Could it be that Isaac left the family after her death, unable to cope? When Julie started looking further into his life, she had a shock. “Someone once told me that if you have an ancestor who’s been convicted of anything, there will be records of them somewhere.” She started with the local papers: “These were free to look at on the Lancashire Library website.” Julie searched for Isaac’s name on the database of the Northern Daily Telegraph and Preston papers, and bingo! She found heaps of information. One article revealed that Isaac had been charged for deserting his family. “He was imprisoned and fined about 8s, the amount his wife had been given by the Poor Law guardians for relief. That told me that my initial instinct was right – he had abandoned them.”
“Isaac was also in trouble for selling ‘bad meat’ on the market in Blackburn – several times,” explains Julie. “The market inspectors said he was selling mutton and beef that was off. Apparently, it was common in Blackburn for traders to sell bad meat.” The Cotton Famine meant people had no money for food. “People are going to buy bad meat if it’s cheap and they’re hungry – they aren’t going to argue.” These misdemeanours were just the tip of the iceberg, however.
Isaac had had a good start in life in leafy Ribchester, although Julie found him in the papers aged 19 when he was a victim of theft – a pair of his shoes had been stolen. However, it all went downhill from there. In 1854, his brother Robert died and Isaac was the executor of his will. Julie discovered that four years later, his sister-in-law took him to court: “He was supposed to be collecting rents for the property of his dead brother, and he hadn’t paid her the rent money – he’d kept it.”
In another court case, Isaac sued for loss of earnings following a fight with a Peter Smith, claiming that the bones in his hand had been broken. Isaac failed to convince the judge that it wasn’t him who started the fight, but was given £5 5s in damages. “Also in 1861 he was fined for riding a horse on footpaths through Corporation Park,” adds Julie.
In 1862, something significant happened that might have tipped the balance for Isaac.
The newspapers reported that he was made bankrupt in March, owing £285 – roughly £24,230 in today’s money. April saw a public sitting for his application for bankruptcy. However, the case was dismissed, and he was accused of reckless trading, intemperance and immoral practices, and given time to make an offer to his creditors.
There’s a final fine reported for selling meat unfit for human consumption in March 1863 – perhaps a last-ditch attempt to raise money. At some point after this he leaves the family, because 1863 is the year he is imprisoned for deserting them. It’s also the year that his first child with Sarah was born in Manchester.
But life in the city wasn’t much better for Isaac. He carried on butchering for a while, but by the 1881 census he was listed as a general labourer and in 1891 he was a “broker, old clothes agent” – ie a rag-andbone man. Then, from 1891 onwards, he was a regular in the Manchester Withington Workhouse records. “He was in and out – tramping I think,” says Julie. “My cousin reckons that Isaac’s second wife kept throwing him out and he’d go drinking and need a bed for the night, so he’d go into the workhouse and come out the next morning.”
Only, one morning, he didn’t come out. The final entry for him reads “Dead, 16.2.05.” According to his death certificate, he died of chronic bronchitis, heart failure, “senile” and a “gangrene foot”.
“It’s quite sad, because he started off in a lovely place in Ribchester in the Ribble Valley and probably with lots of potential,” says Julie. “It’s just awful that he ended up where he did.”
However, she doesn’t mind having Isaac on her tree: “He is quite interesting, quite colourful. I would never judge him, because you don’t know what the circumstances were.”
Good influence
If Isaac had stayed with his family, though, things might have been very different for his descendants. “My Dad was such a solid, hard-working man – as were his brothers and sisters – and the image I got of their own Dad when I found out more about him was the same. I think that influence must have come from Richard Greenwood.” She believes that Isaac leaving was a blessing in some ways: “It’s perhaps because Isaac abandoned his family that I am where I am now,” she muses.
In 1895, at the time Isaac was living his final chaotic years in Manchester, his grandson Richard Greenwood Parker was born in Blackburn – just a month after the death of the kind-hearted chap who had taken in his father and aunt. “It seems that Joseph named his son as a tribute to the man he saw as his father.” Richard Greenwood Parker would grow up to be law-abiding, and hard-working – traits that would pass down through the generations.
The telling of this story is particularly poignant for Julie as she recently lost her Dad, who had always inspired and followed her research with huge interest.