Bill and Pat Buchanan sent be details of Bill’s Warburton ancestors. His grandmother, Ann Main Buchanan’s photograph is on the Miscellaneous page of the Gallery. Ann’s parents, James Main and Martha Warburton were married in Glasgow in 1882, though Martha’s name is Warbritten in the documentation. Martha’s parents were named as Paul Warbritten, a clog maker, and Ann, formerly Tait, a washerwoman.
Paul was originally from Oldham where he married Hannah Jones in 1853. Nothing more has been found of Hannah, but in 1861 Paul is lodging in Glasgow. Ten years later he is in hospital in Glasgow, and he subsequently returned to Oldham where he is on the 1891 census, and where he died. No record of a marriage to Ann Tait has been found but Ann is married and using the name Warburton in the 1871 census where she has two children, Martha aged 5, and Henry aged 5 months.
Ann was the daughter of a soldier. She was probably born in Ireland, and is living in Halifax, Yorkshire in 1841 where her father is stationed in Temporary Barracks. The family returned to Glasgow and her mother is a widow in 1851. Ann married Robert Pope in 1859 but the marriage appears not to have lasted. The fact that Ann reverted to her maiden name Tait in later life suggests this was not because Robert died.
By 1881 Ann and her children, who now include a Robert Porter Tait aged 3, are all using the name Tait. However she has a lodger, Robert Porter who would seem to be the father of her third child. The most likely explanation is that Ann’s first marriage was Catholic one so although it quickly collapsed she remained officially married and couldn’t do so again.
Paul was a 3rd generation clog maker. Both his father Hiram, and grandfather Paul were cloggers on the census or their children’s baptism. Paul senior was born in 1780 in Bolton, but he had moved to Oldham by the time his first child was baptised. His birth, and those of his siblings, were recorded at the quarterly Quaker Meeting of Lancashire held in Liverpool. He was the son of John and Sarah of Bolton.
Finding John and Sarah’s marriage has been problematic. The only marriage in on-line records which is close to the birth of their first child is that to Sarah Jackson in Great Budworth, Cheshire. Although there are no baptisms in Great Budworth to indicate they stayed there, there isn’t any evidence to indicate they moved to Bolton either. However this was a period when the Industrial Revolution was beginning to attract people from rural areas into the mill towns.
The closest marriage in Bolton was in 1764, the marriage of John, a weaver of Heywood to Sarah Ogden, but after the birth of a daughter in 1765 there is an 11 year gap before the children of John and Sarah appear in the Quaker records. I have chosen to put Sarah Jackson in the tree but it is highly speculative.
I have just published the tree of this family. It is included in a new collection of small families called Families 3. I have also moved the Sharples family into this new collection so now both the first two Families collections have 6 families.
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