Thursday 18 April 2013

Coming a Cropper

A change in work commitments meant that I had an entire free morning recently, and with course work up to date I had time to go back to a piece of work I abandoned a few months ago, and hadn't  got back to. I still haven't really got a proper system for keeping track of all the loose ends .

My Great Great Great Grandfather, Samuel Leadbeater, was born in Gomersal West Yorkshire, and was baptised in the Parish Church of Birstall in 1819. His parents were recorded as Thomas and Mary; it isn't common to record both parents names, and immensely helpful in this case, as there clearly at least two Thomas Leadbeaters of marriageable age knocking around that part of Yorkshire in the early 1800s.

I found the marriage of Thomas Leadbeater and Mary Balmforth in 1803, the only one of a Thomas Leadbeater and Mary at around the correct time. But there were a number of other Thomas Leadbeater marriage entries so clearly one or both Thomas's were widowed and remarried. Where the record is the church register, the occupation of the man is recorded which can help, but where there is only a  copy of the Banns you don't have the occupation. Then I spotted that one of the Thomas Leadbeaters had been able to sign his name, whilst the other couldn't write, so I could finally allocate the weddings to the correct Thomas. My Thomas was the illiterate one, and his second marriage, to add to the confusion, was to a Frances Leadbeater who has been widowed.

The second thing which was bothering me were the occupations, as my Thomas seemed to be recorded as both a "cropper" and a "cloth dresser". I was worried that the occupations were very different and that there might be a second Thomas and Mary pairing. I don't know why I didn't do it earlier, but  I looked up the occupation of cloth dresser , and on a site called Spartacus Educational I discovered that cloth dressers were the men who cut the cloth, using shears about 4 feet long, in what was regarded as a skilled occupation. They were also known as croppers! Apparently, their work began to be mechanised in the 1820s, and they were at the vanguard of the Luddite movement.  The site has this picture, which was drawn in 1814, and so is pretty much contemporaneous with my ancestor Thomas Leadbeater.

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