The long history of David Riley’s family in Brontë country
Armed with a handful of deeds, wills and a family Bible inherited from his father, David Riley pieced together the fascinating story of a family living in Brontë country, says Claire Vaughan
On a clear day you can see for miles across the bleak, beautiful West Yorkshire moorland from the top of Penistone Hill. This is Brontë country. One way lies Haworth, where the famous literary sisters grew up. Follow the track in the other direction past Lower Laithe Reservoir, through open moorland dotted with farmhouses, and down a set of stone steps and you’ll come to one of the sisters’ favourite haunts: the ‘Brontë waterfall’. Generations have trodden this ancient route, including the ancestors of Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine reader David Riley. And as he discovered, once he’d wrestled with several thorny family history puzzles, their paths crossed with the area’s most famous inhabitants.
Treasured Inheritance
“My research really started when my father died and I inherited a pile of papers,” explains David. “There were things like deeds, lots of wills – but also the beautiful leather-bound family Bible.
I knew very little about our history before
I began.”
David was born on a small hill farm called Intake Laithe in an upper Pennine valley near Haworth. His father’s papers revealed that the Rileys had lived there from the 1780s. “The Bible was bought by a John Riley, who I later discovered was my 4x great grandfather, and his wife Phillis in 1782 when they moved to the farm. It was a complete record of the Rileys down the generations.” “I started my research with the standard birth, marriages and deaths and census records,” he explains, “then progressed to parish registers.” It was his 3x great grandfather Joseph Riley’s family that presented David with his first mystery. In his 1860 will, Joseph’s brother George left money to a George, John and Robert Sunderland (of South Dean Farm) – plus personal effects including his watch, dresser, bedstead and a chest – with no explanation of who they were.
Curious, David trawled the local records, but was stumped. His only clue came from a book on the area that referred to John as “John Riley Sunderland”. There was clearly some link between the two families. At the time of the 1841 census, George, his wife Jane and their 18-yearold son Frederick were living in a cottage on Intake Laithe Farm, Hey Top, and next door were John and Mary Sunderland and their two-year-old son.
He scoured the local archives for clues, then visited the Keighley Family History Society, where he found half-a-dozen members researching the Sunderlands. One of them had the answer.
“At the time he was going
through the local bastardy records,” says David. Kept by the parish, these listed the fathers of illegitimate children and required them to contribute to the upkeep of the child, so that they didn’t become a burden on the local rates. “He sent me a copy and lo and behold, there they were!”
It seemed a Mary Sunderland had obtained a bastardy order against George Riley in 1818, four years before he married Jane Cowling. “Armed with this information, it was fairly simple to research the three Sunderlands in George’s will,” says David. He discovered that Mary’s illegitimate son, John Sunderland, was born at Cold Knowl, a mile from Intake Laithe, in 1815. John married Maria Feather (also illegitimate) in March 1839 and their first son, George, was born at Cold Knowl less than two months later. Their second son, John, was born at Hey Top in 1843 and Robert followed in 1851, born at a farm called South Dean. They were George’s grandsons via his illegitimate son John.
“I noticed that, at the time, illegitimacy didn’t seem that unusual.
Contrary to what we might expect, children born out of wedlock appear to have been openly accepted by the community.”
Although they all started off working in the local cotton mills, David was fascinated to see what happened to John’s sons. George became a police officer and then master of the Union Workhouse in Skipton, while John Riley Sunderland became head of the Endowed School in Stanbury, where he had studied, when only 26, and was appointed a trustee of Scartop Sunday School. By the age of 28, Robert was an overlooker in a worsted mill, and in 1898 he purchased Ponden Mill for £300 – about £120,000 today.
But the biggest brick wall that
‘Children born out of wedlock appear to have been openly accepted by the community’
David managed to smash was bittersweet. Mystery surrounded the origins of John Riley, his 4x great grandfather, and the earliest name in the family Bible. “We just couldn’t find a baptism for him. Me and my sister, Brenda, spent days looking through microfiches in Bradford City Library trying to find it. We were at an impasse.”
A Shocking Revelation
One day, in desperation, David turned to familysearch.org. “My search came up with a name that fitted and dates that roughly corresponded to the ones given in the Bible, but – shock and horror
– it was in Lancashire!” laughs David, hinting at the ageold rivalry between Yorkshire and its western neighbour. The entry listed John as having been baptised at Colne Parish Church on 19 August 1753, the son of Alexander and Grace Riley.
“My cousin Betty lived there, so she went down to Colne Library and found John’s baptism in the parish records.” But the mystery continued, since David was unable to find where and when John was buried. “Up until that point, all of the family burials had been in the parish church. The librarian at Colne Library suggested to Betty that we try Winewall Inghamite Chapel, near where John Riley had been born.”
Preacher Benjamin Ingham established the Inghamites in the 1750s when he broke away from the Moravian Church. Their teachings were similar to those of the Methodists, and there were around 50 Inghamite chapels in Yorkshire and Lancashire. “Colne Library had memorial inscriptions produced by the local family history society, which also held the baptism and burial records for the chapel.” David was delighted when the Inghamite records yielded a burial for a John Riley. “It said he had lived at Intake Laithe Farm, proving I was looking at the right Riley. That was my biggest discovery.”
David and Betty headed to the graveyard at Winewall Chapel, but finding the grave itself was a real challenge. “The old part of the graveyard was very overgrown. We went to look for the grave several times without any luck. I’d more or less given up, but I thought I’d have one
more go. I took big loppers and a spade with me, and started digging around. A lady walked through the graveyard with her dog at one point and was most perturbed when she saw me digging!” In the undergrowth, David eventually uncovered some steps leading down to another section of the graveyard. “I pulled back all this vegetation, and there was a gravestone with the words ‘John Riley’ and ‘Intake Laithe’ on it.” The inscription revealed that John had died in 1821, aged 68 – it was another great find.
Back To The 17th Century
The deeds among David’s father’s papers, which included one dated 1614 and others from the 1700s, told more of the family’s story. They had inherited a tiny moorland farm at one point, but what had happened to it? “The 1614 deed told me where the farm had been located – next to the Brontë waterfall. Like many of the farms in Brontë country, it was demolished when the land was bought up by a water company.” He cross-referenced information from the deeds with the land tax records on ancestry.co.uk. “From them I could see who had owned and lived in the property.”
But what about that Brontë link? “Well, of course, there was the farm adjacent to the waterfall,” says David – the Brontës would have undoubtedly passed it as they walked to the beauty spot. David also noticed a familiar name on several of the records he’d tracked down. The marriage certificate for John Sunderland and Maria Feather showed the couple were married by Patrick Brontë, minister of Haworth Parish Church and father of the Brontë sisters. “He also buried Joseph Riley, my 3x great grandfather, whose grave I found in Haworth Churchyard. It was wonderful to see Patrick’s signature on the original records.”
So what have been the highs and lows of David’s research? “I think the worst thing was finding out I had Lancashire ancestors,” he chuckles. “I always had us down as ‘real Yorkshire folk’, so it was quite a shock. It was amazing to learn that our family goes back 400 years in this area though.”
But the discovery that his ancestors rubbed shoulders with the Brontës takes first prize. “Finding the link was wonderful. I hadn’t found anything really exciting up to that point – we didn’t seem to be murderers or royalty, and the Brontë link is the closest we got to fame. We were just ordinary folk.”