She was born in 1837/8 in Burnley and she was illegitimate. All I knew of her I had gleaned from her marriage certificate and I wasn’t too hopeful of ever finding anything out about the heritage of an illegitimate child with the first name of Ann or the surname of Fletcher. Surely both names were far too common to be able to make much headway. I did trawl through the parish records and the LDS site, looking for christenings of girls of that name in those years but surprisingly only found one and the year wasn’t right. I put Ann to the back of my list of people to find and turned to those who I would have more luck with.

Then, in September 2002 I came across a site on the internet which mentioned Fletchers of Burnley and an inherited condition called Hypermobility ( double jointed-ness). I mentioned this in passing to my mother and she, a little surprised, told me that her mother and sister had been double jointed. This was the breakthrough that I had been looking for.

Cutting a long story short, this gave me the impetus I needed to search out my Fletcher heritage and to my surprise it all came together.

Ann was found on the 1841 & 1851 census, living with her grandparents at Tunnel End, Burnley. She had been married from there so why I never looked there before is beyond me.

What the census returns showed me was that, in 1841, Ann was part of a large family living at Tunnel End. Her grandparents were JOHN FLETCHER and ANN HEYWORTH. John had been baptised in 1786 at St Peters in Burnley, the son of Nicholas Fletcher and Nancy Pilkington and had died at the age of 56. By occupation he had been a labourer and in 1814 he had married Ann Heyworth ( who was likely a distant relative) born 1791 in Habergham Eaves. All indications were that the family were very poor. They had married in 1814 and had eight children. Mary Ann b 1819, Mary born 1822 and John born 1823 were found in the parish records but all three had died prior to 1841.
James Fletcher was born in 1817 and started out as an agricultural labourer. By 1851 he had married an Elizabeth West and they had a son Jonas Stansfield Fletcher. Jonas ( 1850 - 1896) became an iron moulder and went on to marry and lived at Sandy Gate, Habergham Eaves. His marriage produced a son Edward Stansfield Fletcher who died in his teens in 1893. Whether there were any further children has not yet been established but it is unlikely.

Ruth, born 1820, was another of John and Ann’s children and for a while I suspect that she ( aged 21 in 1841) was gg-grandma Ann’s mother. However, a Fletcher “cousin” has given me compelling reason to believe that it was her sister Elizabeth who was infact my 3xs great grandmother. In 1843 Ruth had married a Thomas Harrison and was living alongside the rest of her family in Tunnel End. There do not appear to have been any children of that marriage. Ruth died sometime between the 1851 & 1860 census returns and her husband Thomas remarried in 1860 to an Elizabeth Wood, with his sister in law Elizabeth as witness.

Also at the family address, in both 1841 and 1851, are Robert and Thomas.
Robert (born 1830) was, in 1851, a labourer at the printworks, while his brother Thomas ( b 1832) was a washer at the same place. Neither boy lived to any great age and neither would appear to have married. Robert died in 1858 of abcesses and Thomas died in 1852 of consumption.

This left only one child of John & Ann Fletcher who could carry on the family name and indeed the Fletcher name in this particular branch died out although not the genes.

Finally, at the same address in 1841, was Elizabeth and Benjamin Wainscott. ELIZABETH was the daughter of John and Ann Fletcher and the eldest of their children, born in 1814 and, more than likely my great great grandmothers elusive mother.
She had married Benjamin Wainscott, an agricultural labourer (five years younger than herself) in 1840 and a year later they had a daughter Mary. By 1851 they had left the address leaving 9 year old Mary living with her widowed grandmother, Uncles Robert and Thomas and her cousin Ann. Where Elizabeth and Benjamin had gone is unknown but, as she was witness to Thomas Harrison’s second wedding, she would not appear to have died. Why she left her children with her mother is unknown.
There was also a lodger at the address, a James Wainscott, probably Mary’s uncle.
Interestingly enough, whilst 13 year old Ann was working as a cotton spinner in 1851, her young cousin Mary Wainscott was down on the census as a nurse aged nine. An unusual occupation for a nine year old ?

Ann Fletcher may not have been christened as a child because of her illegitimacy although that does not appear to have been a barrier to many illegitimate children of that time. Certainly, from records that are available I don’t get the impression that her mother was a particularly caring mother and it seems like it was Anne’s grandmother who gave her some stability in life.

Seven years later when Ann married Giles Jackson she was working as a stitcher in the print works. I don’t know when the print works opened but it seemed to provide quite a bit of valuable employment in the area. Certainly, on my mothers paternal side, in 1841 it provided employment to at least one of my forebears who had lost his craft when mechanization of the weaving industry took place.

I was fortunate enough to be provided with a great deal of information on the Fletchers by Pat Newton and Sue Bibby, also descendants of the Fletchers of Gannow. What I initially would have assumed to have been quite a few families of Fletcher in Burnley, would appear, in fact, to be one large family, with an occasional strange Fletcher appearing from time to time.

The Fletchers of Burnley appear in the parish registers at least as far back as the mid 1500s and judging by the first names are probably descendants of the same Fletchers that inhabited Habergham Eaves and Gannow in the 1700s and beyond.

The likely family tree has not all been confirmed as yet but in 1711 there was a JOHN FLETCHER born in the Ightenhill district. He married ELIZABETH HEYWORTH ( relative of Ann ?) in 1735 and they had at least 4 children, - Peggy, Sarah, Alice and the eldest, JOHN born 1737.

In due course, this John married an ALICE POLLARD in 1762 and over a period of time they had eight children, 6 boys and 2 girls. Of the girls, nothing further is known of Molly and Betty probably married Richard Simpson. Of the boys, nothing further is known, as yet, of John, Jimmy, Thomas and Adam. Nicholas, however, was born in 1763 & Robert in 1764. Both of them married and produced offspring.

Nicholas was the Nicholas who married Nancy Pilkington and they were my 5x great grandparents. Robert, his brother, married Alice who was either Pollard or Riley and they had James, John, Nicholas, Robert and Ann. This son Nicholas (1790 – 1839) in Habergham Eaves and became an engineer. In 1833 he married Mary Driver ( whose family came from Padiham) and they lived on Westgate, Habergham Eaves where they raised their family of five. One of their sons, John, became a blacksmith, married Sarah McKay and moved to Hulme before moving down to London. His descendants live still in the south of England.

The census returns raise many more questions than they answer. Who was the 82 year old farmer in Gatefield, Habergham Eaves who was called Nicholas Fletcher ? Which of the Fletchers was the father of Peter Fletcher and his brothers Brown and Fletcher Fletcher. A lot of work still has to be done on the Fletchers of Habergham Eaves and Gannow but it will eventually be sorted out, giving a heritage going back who knows how far.