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England (Counties as in 1851-1901) => England => Cheshire => Topic started by: Chris Nilsen on Tuesday 12 November 24 11:56 GMT (UK)
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Hello All,
I am seeking some advice about how I can find more information about a John & Sarah Bowden who are living at 'Park', Stockport in the years 1818-1824.
I found 4 baptisms to them (Sarah Ann 1818, Thos 1820-1820, Martha 1821 & Mary 1824).
John was a cotton spinner.
Beyond 1824 I have traced them pretty well and know what other family they had and where they died.
But it's this period of time they spent in Stockport that I need to know more about.
What other indexes/databases exist where they might be mentioned?
I can find no trace of them prior to 1818 and hope that, if some other info can be found, it might give me clues as to their origins.
Any advice appreciated.
Regards,
Chris.
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Beyond 1824 I have traced them pretty well and know what other family they had and where they died.
No details given as to their respective birthyears or birthplaces or when/where they died
Are they on any census from 1841 onwards?
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Censuses 1851 onwards should give place of birth and age.
Pheno
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Censuses 1851 onwards should give place of birth and age.
No entry in Cheshire for a John & Sarah Bowden. Wording of post suggests they moved out of Cheshire hence interest in Stockport
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Censuses 1851 onwards should give place of birth and age.
No entry in Cheshire for a John & Sarah Bowden. Wording of post suggests they moved out of Cheshire hence interest in Stockport
Info would still be appropriate wherever they happen to be located 1851 onwards.
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Exactly - hence my reply 1
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What about the baptisms of Josiah 1807, Joel 1810 Sarah 1812 at St Mary Stockport with parents
John and Sarah?
Is this your family?
1841 census Mottram in Longden Dale
Sarah Bowden 45 not born in county
Sarah 23 born in county
Martha 21
Mary 18
Thomas 21
John 17
Josiah 14
Thomas 7
James 3
Elias Maiden 35
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Censuses 1851 onwards should give place of birth and age.
No entry in Cheshire for a John & Sarah Bowden. Wording of post suggests they moved out of Cheshire hence interest in Stockport
Stockport was in Cheshire at the time.
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What about the baptisms of Josiah 1807, Joel 1810 Sarah 1812 at St Mary Stockport with parents
John and Sarah?
Is this your family?
1841 census Mottram in Longden Dale
Sarah Bowden 45 not born in county
Sarah 23 born in county
Martha 21
Mary 18
Thomas 21
John 17
Josiah 14
Thomas 7
James 3
Elias Maiden 35
Makes sense, Mottram is only a few miles from Stockport and near to Glossop, Hyde etc. where there were lots of mills.
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If the same family, and going by the censuses, the last child to be born was Sarah Maria, mmn Lunney, baptised on 16th September 1838 in Glossop, Derbyshire.
I can't see a marriage between John and Sarah.
1851 - Organ Street, Hollingworth, Ashton under Lyne, Cheshire
Sarah Bowden Head Widow Female 49 1802 Wasking (Washing) Ireland
Thomas Bowden Son Unmarried Male 17 1834 Cotton piecer Tintwistle, Cheshire
Jane Bowden Daughter - Female 13 1838 Assistant to cotton weaver Glossop, Derbyshire
(possibly James in 1841, gender changed from female to male on image)
One tree has John Bowden marrying Sarah Lunney, but no details for either on births or marriage
David
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I don't know if it is the same person, but there is an article in the Derbyshire Currier on 4th May 1839 about an inquest for John Bowden.
It states that he was a pensioner who had been in Stockport to receive his quarter's pension, and was returning home by the Glossop Market coach when, on arriving a short distance from Mottram, he jumped off the coach and fractured his skull and died the following morning.
There was a burial in Glossop on 2nd May 1839 age 54.
David
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Censuses 1851 onwards should give place of birth and age.
No entry in Cheshire for a John & Sarah Bowden. Wording of post suggests they moved out of Cheshire hence interest in Stockport
Stockport was in Cheshire at the time.
To be precise, those parts South of the Mersey were. The rest was in Lancashire.
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I always think of Stockport as being the town itself, not the outlying districts such as Heaton Norris which were in Lancashire.
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Depends what you consider to be the “town itself”. The old boundary between Cheshire and Lancashire runs down the middle of the Merseyway shopping centre. The clue is in it’s name - it’s built over the river. Before that, Princes Street, (previously Heaton Lane) the main shopping street, was in Lancashire.
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Thank you everyone for the responses.
I can confirm all the records located after 1827 are correct. Any trees found are probably mine.
The 3 earlier baptisms for John & Sarah are interesting though, and may indicate there’s more to this story.
I looked up the registers and the first two just say ‘Stockport’ whereas the Sarah’s baptism abode is given as ‘Cale Green’.
Is this anywhere near ‘Park’ in Stockport?
Records I have suggest that John was born c1785 and Sarah nee Lunney born c1801.
This would make Sarah too young to be the mother of Joel, Josiah (1st) and Sarah from 1812.
Perhaps John married two Sarah’s. But I cannot find either of them.
I’m happy to search un-indexed registers to look for possible marriages, but where should I be looking, and have all of them been indexed anyway?
I think I once discovered a burial for a Sarah Bowden, wife of John in Stockport burials. I might need to find that again.
I looked at Cheshire Land Tax assessments but found nothing conclusive.
Where else can I look?
Are there directories maybe for Stockport, or other records available?
Thanks again.
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As a cotton weaver it is unlikely he owned his house, so he will not appear in land tax records.
There might be a will of a landowner that mentions the names of tenants of property they own.
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Cale Green is a small area to the south west of the town centre (just beyond the workhouse). Originally, hardly more than a village, it quickly became subsumed into the town as a whole.
I too was wondering what was meant by “Park”. I’d have a look for you but I’m currently 200 miles away using an iPad and campsite wifi! Maybe next week if you aren’t sorted.
Within a stone’s throw of Cale Green today are Davenport Park - not sure whether it was there during the time period you’re looking at - and Edgeley Park - the home of the local football club - I’m sure that has nothing to do with it! An area called “Park” usually has a word before it defining where it is.
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ADDED: see my next post, which I am much more confident about.
Various newspaper articles from the early 19th century list the following streets as being at 'Park, Stockport': King Street, Queen Street and Mersey Street.
https://maps.nls.uk/view/114581257#zoom=5.2&lat=3652&lon=5937&layers=BT
This map view 1874 (1893) shows Mersey Street at the extreme east side running ~ EW, King Street running NS from the Mersey Bridge with Queen Street running parallel to it further east.
I wonder if 'Park' is a reference to Cheadle Moseley House and the associated land. the notable empty space in the map?
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Very confusing. All of those street names also appear in another area of Stockport.
https://maps.nls.uk/view/231283941#zoom=4.7&lat=5892&lon=10505&layers=BT (https://maps.nls.uk/view/231283941#zoom=4.7&lat=5892&lon=10505&layers=BT)
Note Park Mills and Park Bridge. Mersey Street runs NS to the east and parallel with King Street.
There are early newspaper references to the Neptune Inn in Mersey Street, Park. In the 1861 census there is an entry for the Neptune Inn, Mersey Street, and the enumerators route is Princess Street, King Street, Mersey Street (including Arden Arms marked on the map at the south end of Mersey Street) Simister Street, Gass Yard (see opposite Arden Arms) and Millgate.
Annoyingly the Neptune Inn is not marked but even in the 1861 census there occupant is listed as a miller, not a publican, so perhaps by the date of the map, 1873, it was no longer recognised as a public house.
It seems that Mersey Street was renamed to Corporation Street.
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I’d go along with Alan Boyd on this. Park Mills and Park Bridge (which remains today) suggest that the area may have been referred to as “Park”. Although much has changed over the years; inter alia Wharf Street is now Great Portwood Street - reflecting the name of the area it ran through - what was Mersey Street now runs beneath the Asda car park. The Ardern Arms pub is still there although I was taken aback a couple of months ago when it appeared in a TV drama as somewhere in Dundee!
To cap it all, I was baptised and my late parents were married in Teviotdale (re-named Tiviot Dale) Chapel on the opposite bank of the river to Park Mills. I suspect that Peter Arrowsmith’s “History of Stockport” may have something to say about “Park” but that’ll have to wait ‘til I get home.
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Back home. First the bad news - I appear to have mislaid Peter Arrowsmiths book. The good news is that, more recently, he carried out an archaeological assessment on another site in the centre of Stockport which contains the following -
“In 1732 the first water-powered textile mill in the North-West was built in the Park in Stockport (an area now occupied by Sainsbury’s) for the production of silk yarn.”
So it appears that Alan Boyd is right. Sainsbury, as people may know, has since closed down and, like much of the rest of the town centre appears to be quietly rotting away!
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I found on an old map (1873) that shows an area known as 'Park Mills'.
It sits just below the junction of the Mersey, Goyt & Tame rivers.
It is boarded by streets named Warren, Mersey, Vernon, Park & Queen.
Warren street runs over the Park Bridge.
I have attached the map image I found.
I have also ruled out the earlier baptisms to John & Sarah as being from the same family.
They are almost certainly from the John Bowden who married Sarah Cheetham in 1790.
I think this is the Sarah, wife of John buried in 1818.
I think I'm back to square one.
I'm pretty sure I have the correct death record for John (1839), and the correct census entries for Sarah and the issue (1841-1861), but discovering something extra about them in Stockport, including their marriage and their baptisms seems to be missing.
Thanks everyone for your help.
Chris.
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Chris, just to be clear, the map you’ve found is the same one Alan Boyd linked to and the one I commented on.
As I’ve said, the Mersey formed the boundary between Cheshire and Lancashire and Stockport nowadays, if not then, straddles it. For a family living so close to the river, it would therefore be wise to extend your search into Lancashire/Manchester as it’s quite conceivable that marriages, baptisms etc. took place there.
I think you’ll find that the parish church for anything north of the river, back in the day, was actually Manchester Cathedral and, should you come across St Thomas’ Church, remember that there are two of them - one south of the river and one on the A6 a mile or so north.
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Thanks everyone,
I checked the Lancashire OPC index for a marriage but there was nothing there. But the site doesn’t say if all the marriages have indexed, just the number that have been. Maybe I should contact the OPC and ask if all marriages have been transcribed or if I need to search the registers myself.
I know that Mary Bowden, daughter of John & Sarah married in Ashton under Lyne in 1842, even though she (and her spouse) were both from Tintwistle. Not sure why they married in AuL and not Mottram which was their closest church.
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I've hesitated to post this, as I have both John and Sarah Bowden in my records but they are very unlikely to be helpful for the Bowden family in Stockport. However, it's something that people interested in Bowden families should be aware of. The name is common, not only in Greater Manchester but also in Devon (especially South Devon) and neighbouring counties with very few occurrences between Somerset and Manchester. However, the equivalence of names is almost certainly coincidental and they arose independently in the two places. Apart from anything else the pronunciation is different: the first syllable rhymes with "low" in Greater Manchester and with "how" in Devon. (Although my own family is from Devon, we pronounce it ahistorically with "low", but that is only because my great-grandmother thought that the "how" pronunciation was "common").
We became aware of Bowdens in Greater Manchester when we lived in Hale between 1954 and 1965. My sister, then called Cornish-Bowden, worked for a while in a solicitor's office in Manchester for a Mr Bowden.
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Of course Bowdon was in Cheshire when you lived nearby. I lived in Hale from 1941 to 1954, then Hale Barns until 1960, then Bowdon. Note this Bowdon is spelled with an o, not e as the penultimate letter.