My first sighting of HENRY HARTLEY is in 1878 in Colne when his son MATTHEW HARTLEYmarried at the age of about 20. Matthew was a weaver and in 1878 had moved to Chapel St, Marsden, Nelson. The marriage certificate stated father as Henry Hartley, also a weaver. There was no notation of his father being deceased so I began a fruitless search for Henry in both the 1881 and 1871 census.

Even finding Matthew before his marriage was proving to be an uphill struggle. I discovered a birth registration for Colne for the right year but that turned out to be an illegitimate lad with a mother named Susannah Hartley of Waterside. Not my Matthew as his dad was Henry. So, on I searched, finally having a glimmer of success in the 1871 census when I found Matthew living as a son-in-law to a Richard Walker and his wife Mary. This wasn’t a son-in-law in the conventional sense as Matthew was unmarried as was his brother Thomas who was also down as a son-in-law of Richard Walker. Then there were two Hartley sisters – Sarah Ann & Elizabeth – and the beginnings of what ended up as quite a sizeable Walker family. Clearly Mary Hartley had been widowed and by 1871 had married Richard Walker.

The 1881 census had them living next door to Matthew but there was nothing to indicate relationship as, by then, the girls were down under the name of Walker and Thomas was living with Matthew and his new family.

So, there was nothing left to do but trace them all in the 1861 census and with the name of the mother it would make it so much easier. Or so I thought.

1861 showed Mary to indeed be living in Waterside, Colne with Thomas, Matthew and Sarah Ann while working as a washerwoman. But it also showed her to be unmarried.

Everyone knows that census enumerators were not infallible and this one must have made an error because I knew Matthew’s father to be Henry Hartley, as per his marriage certificate. But this also raised questions. If Henry was Matthew’s father and presumably still alive, was he working away? Elizabeth still had not been born and wasn’t due for another year so he had to possibly be working away from home and coming back on his days off?

There was nothing left to do but to get hold of Sarah Ann’s birth certificate, which I duly did and discovered a thin black line through the name of the father. So maybe Henry had died after Matthew was born and Mary just got a little lonely, resulting in the arrival of Sarah and later on Elizabeth. Perhaps they just used the name Hartley for convenience sake as that was the married name of their mother.

My next step was to find the marriage of Richard Walker and Mary, which showed them as having married in February 1862, just around the time that Elizabeth was born. So Elizabeth was more than likely to be Richard’s child. More telling, was the status of Mary at time of marriage to Richard………spinster. So the girl born Laneshaw Bridge, nr Colne was born Mary Hartley and it wasn’t her married name. Her father’s name also raised more questions as the name on her marriage certificate was John Stow, while Richard Walker’s father was a Hartley Pickles.

Illegitimacy was far from unusual in the working classes and this certainly wasn’t the first example in my family history but it was so frustrating to have generation after generation raising questions that didn’t seem to get answered.

Who was Henry Hartley? Was it just coincidence that Matthews’s father had the same surname as his mother, after all, Hartleys were ten a penny. Or did he even exist? Could he have been a fabrication of Matthew’s imagination? Or perhaps his mother just told him his father’s name was Henry and Matthew added the Hartley. Or maybe Matthew didn’t even know he was illegitimate.

I will admit to having some uncharitable thoughts about my 3 x great grandma Mary Hartley, not through any judgement of how her life might have been but rather because she has provided me with so many questions that I may never know the answer to!

So what do I know for sure?

MATTHEW HARTLEY was born in Colne in 1858, son of Mary Hartley, a washerwoman born 1833. Matthew was, by 1903, a winding master in the mills. He had married an ELIZABETH HOWKER on January 5th, 1878 at St Paul’s Church, Little Marsden, Lancashire. Elizabeth was a cotton weaver and possibly illiterate.
At this time, if a child was to work part time whilst still of a school age, a certificate had to be produced showing their age and other details. On examining this certificate for Elizabeth’s daughter Charlotte, it shows the mark of Elizabeth, rather than her signature. However, on looking at the earlier marriage certificate of Matthew and Elizabeth it shows that it was signed by her. The wedding certificate also shows that witnesses to their wedding were EDWIN HOWKER, brother to Elizabeth and ELIZABETH DIGGINGS. These two later married. Matthews address was, in 1878 12 Chapel St, Marsden and he was still there in 1881. By 1891 they had moved to 3 Waterworth St, Marsden.

Also in the 1881 census there is a lodger THOMAS HARTLEY, a stone masons labourer, aged 36, born Colne, Lancs. This was Matthew's brother. Next door was Mary Walker nee Hartley with her husband Richard Walker b 1821 with two Hartley daughters - Sarah Ann (father unknown) and Elizabeth (father probably Richard Walker) plus a huddle of Walker children of Richard and Mary. Interesting to note many of the names of Matthew’s children echoed the names of his half brothers and sisters so presumably they were close.

Matthew and Elizabeth Hartley raised their family first in Chapel Street where MARY E HARTLEY and CHARLOTTE HARTLEY were born in 1879 and 1880 respectively. By 1891, Mary was working in the mills as a weaver, though probably part time.
Charlotte, my great grandmother, was born on 21st May 1880 and married THOMAS THORPE on October 3rd 1903 in Marsden. At this time she was living with her family in Railway St, Nelson. That was right by the railway crossing which was, in those days, quite a primitive one and people would, from time to time, get hit by a train. One of the gory stories handed down was that Great Great Grandma Elizabeth would go out and collect up the bits of body and put them in a sack because she was the only person with the stomach to do it.

Charlotte and Tommy lived in the Marsden area of Nelson until they died. (Grandma Charlotte died in 1956). A widow by then and living alone, she was clearing up one night after a game of bridge, when she had a stroke and died suddenly. Always described as a warm, soft and gentle kind of person, she owned a little sweet shop upon Marsden Heights and would make her own toffee. My dad would have warm memories of spending time with his gran and remember little things like how, at Easter, she would serve up boiled eggs in little chicken egg-cosies.
As a girl she worked as a bookkeeper for some relatives who allegedly made Hartleys Jam though it is not yet known how they were related.

My uncle has a vague recollection of writing to an uncle or cousin in India who worked at the Euthymol toothpaste factory there. He called him Uncle Ralph and Aunt Fifi though I can find no record to indicate whether Ralph was a Hartley, never mind who Aunt Fifi was!

Charlottes daughter Bet died quite young and her widower remarried shortly after to a widow Gladys Watson (nee' Bowker). Gladys was actually one of Granny Bets Hartley cousins and was one of the daughters of Mary E who had married a John Bowker.

Gladys married Rennie Watson before she was widowed and married my grandpa, her cousin’s widower.There were no children by either of her marriages.

Gladys also had a sister Connie who married "Uncle Loll". Auntie Connie used to own a little flowershop across the road from Nelson library and she would keep a little white wicker basket there for me and would fill it with flowers for the Whit Walks. I have some very strong memories of that flower shop and my little white basket and although Auntie Connie died when I was a young child, I have some very warm memories of her and her florist shop, "Bowkers of Nelson".

Auntie Connie was not simply my step- grandmother's sister and my grandmother's cousin. I discovered, in later years, that before she married Uncle Loll and before Granny Bet had married my grandfather Frank Hebden, Connie had been engaged to Frank Hebden. Basically grandpa first got engaged to Connie Bowker, then married her cousin Bet Thorpe and then married Connie's sister and Bet's cousin,Gladys Watson nee Bowker. Well, they do say "keep it within the family"! It does, however, make me my own distant cousin a couple of times over. Fortunately neither Connie nor Gladys had any children of their own, otherwise the whole thing might have got really confusing.

I know little else of any of Matthew and Elizabeth’s children except LILY. She was known as “Lalla” and my father could remember her very well. I just wish I had listened a bit more closely to the stories before he died. One story that I do remember about Lalla, was that she was coming to us for Christmas Day when I was a baby. Lalla lived on the same road as my parents, just a few doors away. She insisted that my father come and collect her in the car and that he made sure that the car was freshly washed before he picked her up. Whenever she went out in a car, she insisted on it having a wash for the occasion, whether dirty or not. Lalla married WILLIE LUND (a gas meter man) but did not have any children.

Grandma Gladys died very suddenly in the night, after only a few years of marriage to my grandfather but I have some wonderful memories of her and her sister Connie. She might not have been my real grandma but she was the only grandma I ever really knew and she was a wonderful grandmother to have.

Sadly I do not know if I have any Hartley or Bowker distant cousins in existence but hopefully there will be some out there in the ether who might come across this page and it might ring a bell or two.