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Ancestors of Daniel Dunkerley [Note: References, in square brackets, are quoted at the end. You can go to the reference by pressing ' ctrl+f ' and input the reference you want e.g. [23] then pressing 'Enter', and return to your place in the text by simply pressing 'Enter' again].
Into the landscape that spread out below Besom Hill, north of Oldham, somehow, somewhere, a baby called Daniel was born and he is the ancestor of our line of the Dunkerley family. The birth was perhaps in about 1752, as deduced from the fact that we know he was married in 1773 when he is likely to have been about 20 years old. The birth records for St. Mary’s, the only church in Oldham that then maintained registers, list several candidates for our Daniel Dunkerley[1]. An IGI[2] entry states that our Daniel was born in 1748, but an examination of the original entry and the burial records in subsequent years strongly indicates that this Daniel died in 1752 in his fourth year. Similarly another Daniel who was born in 1750 seems to have died in 1751 – infant mortality was sadly common in those days. The next earlier Daniel was born in 1739/40, so would have been about 33 if he married in 1773, possible, but perhaps unlikely[3]. There are, unfortunately, four plausible known candidates for our Daniel Dunkerley born after 1750 and their cases are set out in the following paragraphs. Although there are no obvious gaps in the registers at this time, we cannot be certain that we have access to full information.
First comes Daniel, son of Mathew[4] Dunkerley who was a weaver, and Sarah, nee Holden, living at Side of Sholver Moor when the baby was baptised on 12th February 1752. This Daniel appears to have survived into adulthood and is therefore a candidate that requires further consideration.
Second is Daniel, son of James Dunkerley, also a weaver, and Elizabeth, nee Taylor. When Daniel was baptised on 19th April 1752 they were living either in Sholver or at Sholver Moor. Again this Daniel appears to have survived childhood and so becomes a second plausible candidate for our Daniel.
Third there is Daniel, son of Daniel Dunkerley, again a weaver, and Anne, nee Wrigley, also living at Side of Sholver Moor when their son was baptised on 19th January 1753. Based on the belief that the father died in 1754, Rosemary Brown thinks that this family ended up in Oldham workhouse and that young Daniel died there and was buried on 5th December 1757. However it is hard to be certain, so he too may be a candidate for our Daniel; he is probably the least likely of these three.
Finally, a Daniel Dunkerley baptised on 19th January 1753, son of Daniel Dunkerley and Anne Wilde of Sholver Moor, descendents of Martha Dunkerley (Chart 6 of Rosemary Brown’s website) has come to light. There is little further information about him.
‘Sholver’[5] is the name of an ancient settlement situated about two miles northeast of Oldham town centre, described by James Butterworth in 1817 as ‘a small village of great antiquity’[6]; David Needham in the publication ‘Around Saddleworth’, mentions a report of 1250 in which a Torfin de Dene of Sholver ran away after killing a man; Edwin Butterworth quotes a reference to it in 1291[7]. The village, or ‘fold’, gave its name to the parts of the landscape lying to its north and east towards Besom Hill, such as ‘Sholver Hey’, ‘Sholver Moor’ and ‘Sholver Slack’, among others.
As regards the first three candidates for ‘our’ Daniel, all three were related. Mathew and James, were second cousins, each the son of a father of the same name who were the sons of John Dunkerley, born in 1653. The first and third Daniels were first cousins, each the grandson of Mathew Dunkerley, son of the same John Dunkerley. The evidence is therefore tilted in favour of this John Dunkerley being the great grandfather of the Daniel we are seeking and so a family ancestor. However our line could also descend from Martha Dunkerley, so in effect, and for now, it is impossible to trace our lineage back beyond the Daniel Dunkerley who married Alice Taylor, born about 1752.
When Rosemary Brown was tracing her own Dunkerley ancestors she also had difficulty in identifying her family line and did an immense amount of detailed work on birth/baptism, marriage, death/burial, and other records to try and reconstruct the early history of the Dunkerley families of Oldham. The following information derives entirely from her work that she has been kind enough to make available (http://dunkerley-brown.co.uk/dunkerleycharts.aspx). Our two families may connect at some level in this difficult period but by the time we reach back to John Dunkerley there is a fair chance that we are related.
It appears to have been a Dunkerley tradition during this period that ‘John’ should be the name given to the firstborn son. The name ‘John Dunkerley’ first appears in the Muster Rolls of 1569[8]. This John may have had at least three children, John, Mary and James. Proof is lacking, but Rosemary concluded that James was the son of interest to us; he was probably born in the late 1560s or the 1570s, during the long reign of Elizabeth I, and is thought in his turn to have had at least three children, John, David and Moses. Moses was baptised in May 1605; there is evidence to suggest that he married several times and had a number of children, one of the oldest being Daniel Dunkerley who was probably born in the 1630s. Again proof has been hard to come by, but Rosemary thinks that the Daniel from whom she descends is the Daniel who was Moses’ son. Moses was also the father of Martha Dunkerley, through whom our fourth ‘Daniel’ candidate descends.
Dr. Rathbone, who also links to the Dunkerley family, has studied the records of the Overseers of the Poor of Oldham from 1681. Based on the information they provide he has concluded that the Dunkerleys of Oldham during this period were among the poorest of the parish. Until 1722 no Dunkerley was a contributor to the Poor Rates with the exception of a Luke Dunkerley who paid 1s 2d in 1697 and 1s in 1698[9]. On the other hand from 1681 almost continuously until 1706 various Dunkerleys were in receipt of relief. They seem to have included Daniel Dunkerley, the presumed son of Moses (described above), who had his rent paid for several years from 1688 as well as receiving 4d per week in income; at the time he would have been approaching sixty years old and perhaps unable to work.
Daniel Dunkerley (born 1630s) first appeared in the parish registers in November 1653 as the father of John Dunkerley; no siblings are known but may have existed. John married Susan Thorpe, possibly in Manchester Cathedral on 24th April 1669 when he would have been only sixteen. Both families lived at Lower Horsedge, just north of Oldham village (see picture above).
Rosemary presumes that John and Susan had an oldest son called John, in the Dunkerley tradition, but unfortunately there are gaps in the registers during this period so the theory cannot be proven[10]. In any case, they are known to have had at least six other children, three boys and three girls. Sara, their oldest daughter was baptised in 1681 and may have married in 1707; the other two girls, Martha and Rebecca, died young. Their second son, David, died in infancy, but the two youngest, Mathew and James[11], who were respectively baptised in 1693 and 1695, survived into manhood and are critical to understanding the possible origins of our Daniel Dunkerley. On 4th February 1700/01 their father, John Dunkerley, died. Some time later Mathew and James both moved to Broadbent.
Mathew, who was described as a weaver and from ‘near Broadbent’ married Hanna or Anne Heywood in 1714. They had six children, all of whom survived, the boys were John, Daniel, James and Mathew, the girls were Mary and Anne.
The youngest son, Mathew, married twice, the first time to Sarah Holden. They had ten children, the fourth of whom was Daniel, born in 1752 and the first candidate for the Daniel Dunkerley we are seeking.
Mathew’s second son, Daniel, married Anne Wrigley with whom he had six children. The youngest was called Daniel and is the third of the possible candidates for the Daniel Dunkerley we are seeking. Rosemary, however, thinks that this Daniel may have died in 1757 in the workhouse.
James, who was also described as a weaver, married Martha Jackson and they also had six children, at least four of whom survived. The boys were James, John, Daniel and Joseph and the girls were Mary and Martha.
James, their oldest son, married Elizabeth Taylor and they had no less than twelve children, of whom the eighth, Daniel, born in 1752 is the second candidate for the Daniel Dunkerley we need.
The baptism records of their many children show that Mathew and James Dunkerley seem to have followed one another around. In 1719 Mathew was at Barrowshaw and James was nearby at Count Hill, but by 1723 they were both at Count Hill. Soon afterwards they moved a little further north to a property called Cleggs, which was near Sholvermoor, and according to the Poor Ley Records for 1722 it appears that James had purchased the property and leased it to tenants. From 1724 Mathew’s name joins James’ at Cleggs and from 1725 to at least 1745 they seem to have occupied the property themselves. The Window Tax of 1733 showed that both Mathew and James had nine windows and paid 2 shillings tax each; the only other Dunkerley who paid a similar amount was Daniel Dunkerley, the son of John and Ann of Sholver. Edwin Butterworth’s History of Oldham states[12] that ‘A Mathew Dunkerley possessed Cleggs tenement in Sholver in 1747’.
As further evidence that Mathew’s and James’ families kept in close touch is the fact that no less three of their children married each other – they were second cousins. There was also another family marriage; Jane, James’ niece (daughter of Joseph), married an Enoch Dunkerley.
Rosemary has followed many of the descendents of Mathew and James Dunkerley in fascinating detail, revealing that some of them became well to do and able to leave wills when they died. However what is now of interest to us is to follow the story of the Daniel we are looking for, whichever one of the four candidates he is (or even if he is an unknown fifth candidate), and try to follow his story down the years (go to 'Daniel Dunkerley - a handloom weaver').
Written by: Philip M. Dunkerley
This version: 2 July 2006
References
[1] This information has most kindly been made available to me by Rosemary Brown, nee Dunkerley, who painstakingly collected it from microfilm.
[2] International Genealogical Index, available on the internet at www.familysearch.org.
[3] Rosemary Brown, in an unpublished report, found that the most common age for a Dunkerley of the time to marry was between 20 and 25.
[4] This ‘Mathew’ and the ‘James’ of the next paragraph have been bolded from here on to facilitate their identification and avoid confusion with others of the same names.
[5] All the places mentioned in the following paragraphs, with the exception of Clegg’s tenement, are shown on James Butterworth’s map of Oldham Parish, 1817 and can also be found via http://www.old-maps.co.uk. Sholver is on modern maps. Count Hill, Barrowshaw, Broadbent and Sholver Moor are all within about a mile of Sholver.
[6] ‘An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Town and Parochial Chapelry of Oldham in the County of Lancaster’ by J. Butterworth, Printed by J. Clarke, 1817.
[7] Edwin Butterworth, Historical Sketches of Oldham (1856), reprint of 1981 by E. J. Morten, (Publishers), Manchester. ISBN 0 85972 048 9
[8] This information was found by Dr. Peter Rathbone, another eminent Dunkerley researcher
[9] One shilling and two pence and one shilling respectively. There were 12 pence to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound. In those days a cottage could be rented for about 8s or 10s a year.
[10] There is a John Dunkerley in the area at this time and his age and movements fit with what would be expected of a son of John and Susan.
[11] Respectively the fathers of our ‘bolded’ Mathew and James!
[12] On page 58.
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