Jane Grimshw Spedding was
born 28 Feb 1789 in Batley, Yorkshire; the ninth of eleven children of Charles
Spedding and Mary Ellis. She was on the
only one of the children to be given a middle name. At the time in England, middle names were not
common and in fact, based on my family history research, were not common until
the mid-1800s. My assumption is that
Grimshaw is a family name and that in 1789 there was a reason to commemorate it.
I haven’t yet found definite Grimshaw
ancestry but her grandmother, and mother of Mary Ellis, may have been Sarah
Grimshaw. More research is needed to be
certain as Ellis is a common surname.
Jane was baptised 8 Mar 1789
in Batley parish church. At the time,
along with some other parishes in Yorkshire, that church used Dade
registers. Dade registers have the
advantage of recording a lot of information that wasn’t normally recorded, such
as Jane’s date of birth and the names of her grandfathers, Robert Spedding and
John Ellis. This is very useful for
proving links between generations. The
short time of about a week between birth and baptism is thought to have been
the norm at a time of high infant mortality.
During Jane Grimshaw
Spedding’s lifetime, Batley changed from a small community of farmers and
weavers into an industrial town, quadrupling in size. Jane’s family were well off. Her father was a butcher and innkeeper who
was leader in the local community, taking on such roles as church warden and
overseer of the poor. The inn was the
“Bull and Butcher” and in 1801 the family lived there.
Another sign of the status of
Jane’s family was her marriage by licence on 12 Jul 1809, Batley, to John
Akeroyd. I don’t know why they got
married by licence but there are a few possible reasons: John was illegitimate,
so it is possible that Jane’s family didn’t approve of him; they came from
different parishes, so there may have been an issue with calling banns or it
may just have been a status symbol for Jane’s family. Jane was not pregnant, another reason for a licence. Her first child was born a respectable ten
months after the wedding. One odd thing
about the licence is that Jane is sworn to be aged twenty-one and upwards but
she was actually only twenty. It is
possible she didn’t know her exact age.
John Akeroyd was a farmer
from Wragby and may be worthy of his own story being told at some point. When John and Jane married, he may have been
responsible for his two young and recently orphaned half-siblings, Mary and
Robert Bennington. So Jane probably became
an instant mother, as well as wife.
Between 1810 and 1821, Jane and John had six children born in Ryhill,
near Wragby, where John was a farmer.
The family then moved to
Batley, and had four more children, including my ancestor Abraham Akeroyd, born
in 1827. The move to Batley took place a
couple of years after Jane’s father Charles died in 1819. Following the move, John took over the “Bull
and Butcher”, although he also continued as a farmer.
Sadly, in 1839, John Akeroyd
died of Cholera. He left his farm to his
“dear wife Jane”. From the names listed
in the will, it appears that two of his children died before it was written.
In the 1841 and 1851 censuses,
Jane Akeroyd is listed as a farmer and in 1851 she had 12 acres. I wonder whether she kept running the family
farm through choice or necessity. Jane
had grown up sons in 1839 who could have joined the family business but they
also had their own jobs.
Jane died in 1855 and was
buried in Batley churchyard
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