All History Matters by Carlo Harrison Continuing with the biography of John Yeadon written and shared with us by David Kitchen. A few years ago I got very lucky. Whilst researching the family of my paternal grandmother Ida Wilkinson, I had been struck by how many of her mother’s ancestors had surnames in common with children that I was at school with in the 1960’s. Most prominent were the names Dawson, Myers, Butterfield, Slater, Denison, Dean and especially Yeadon which I had a double helping of. A man named John Yeadon, born in the town of Yeadon in 1764 cropped up again and again. Baptised at the parish church in neighboring Guiseley, he lived all his life in Yeadon and worked in a trade allied to the woollen textile industry. He had fourteen children; eleven survived and most married and produced their own tribes of children. Lots of spokes and he was the hub. It was around this time that I spent a morning in the library whilst visiting my mother who still lived in the town of Yeadon. This is the place that I grew up in as did most of my forbears who had been agricultural labourers or textile workers there for at least four hundred years. Some ventured out and got to the next village but one, but generally they had not gone far in all that time. The habit of having surnames, keeping them and passing them onto our kids only really took hold in the fourteenth century. Where you lived, what you did for a job, a personal characteristic, a landscape feature, or whose son you were the most common ways of getting one. So and so of Yeadon had become So and So Yeadon. This habit no doubt took some time to reach this particular bit of ground but I can put names to people as far back as the sixteenth century when keeping parish records became the norm. Some of the holders of this name ventured over the parish boundary and were scattered to the four winds. A name sake of my John Yeadon, an immigrant from England was living in Nova Scotia in 1811 and raising a legal petition which made mention of a neighboring settlement of Rawdon. I don’t know where about in England he came from but maybe he would have known that in Yorkshire, Rawdon is the village over the hill from Yeadon. I like to think he swapped one Yeadon for another across the Atlantic. My ‘Yeadon’s though had continued to look over the hill at the original Rawdon for a very long time. They had not gone far. In the library I glanced through a local history book. In the appendices I found an extract from a diary written by my John Yeadon. I knew he was mine because he had thoughtfully put together a table listing all of his children! It’s not at all unusual for family bibles to contain this kind of information, but this was from a diary which had survived goodness knows how. Alongside the table was a number of short extracts from that document. An ancestor of mine was ‘talking to me’ from two hundred years ago. He spoke about his family life, international affairs, local incidents as well as his life as a local preacher in the Methodist church in Yeadon and in his home valley. He wrote about the French Revolution and the execution of the king as a news event. The table was written on New Year’s Day in 1839. It’s the credit side of the balance sheet of his life. Eleven children and forty nine grand children. The daughters are listed in their married names. Tuesday January 1st 1839. New Year Day On my Family John Yeadon Sr. Aged 74 years two months Number Names When Born Grand child The age of my children today 1 James Yeadon Aug 7 1788 9 49 and 5 months 2 Hanh Yeadon Oct 1 1790 47 and 9 months 3 M. Fieldhouse May 5th 1792 5 46 and 8 months 4 Joseph Yeadon December 22nd 1793 10 45 years 5 Nany Rawnsley July 26th 1795 / 43 and 5 months 6 Benj. Yeadon April 4th 1797 3 41 and 9 months 7 Betty Murgatroyd June 1799 5 39 and 6 months 8 Ruth Claughton Feby 1802 5 35 and 10 months 9 Sam Yeadon Aug 1804 4 33 and 5 months 10 Martha Fieldhouse May 1806 2 32 and 7 months 11 Jacob Yeadon Jan 22 1808 4 31 nearly A good many people in the town of Yeadon will have ancestors in that list. We will come back to it later at its proper place in John’s time line.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:18:00 +0000
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