Page 54 - Just another English family (Sep 2019)

and John’s birth in around 1852. So what happens to them all in the next fifty years after 1861? But first, let’s try to summarise the family in 1861.
Using the conventions developed for analysing the descendants of Thomas and Elizabeth Soothill (see above) we can see that this grouping has just eight members of whom all but one (David’s wife, Martha) were born a Soothill. These eight members are distributed between just two addresses – both in Bradford. There are, in fact, five youngsters aged under 21 years of whom three are boys; however, there is only one male (David) who is in the reproductive window of 18 to 50 years. The two heads of households are father (John) and son (David) and it is interesting to note that John’s youngest son, John, is only four years older than David’s elder child, Rhoda Hannah.
So what happens subsequently? John died eight years later in 1869 in Bradford aged around 62 years. He lived long enough to see most of his grandchildren. By 1869, David and Martha had produced five children - Rhoda Hannah (1855-?), John Edward (1857-1908), James Albert (1862-1864), Ann Maria (1864-1866) and Samuel (1866-1962) – while their sixth child, Louisa (1870-?) arrived roughly a year after their paternal grandfather’s death. Sadly, David, the father of this family, died around five years later in 1875 at the comparatively young age of 42 years. Martha was, thus, left with a young family still to bring up. Rhoda Hannah would have been about 19 years, John Edward about 17 years, Samuel about nine years and Louisa about five years. James Albert and Anna Maria had already died.
Rhoda Hannah married in Bradford in 1890, while the third daughter, Louisa also married in Bradford in 1892, so there are no spinster daughters to look out for in the 1911 census. The surviving two boys - John Edward (1857-1908) and Samuel (1866-1962), had very different terms of longevity. John Edward, born in Otley in 1857, died aged 50 in Bradford in 1908 after marrying Elizabeth Oldfield in Bradford in 1880. John Edward had married Elizabeth Oldfield in 1880 in Bradford. Elizabeth lived till the age of 77 years, dying in Bradford in 1940. John Edward and Elizabeth produced nine children – two boys and seven girls – over about a 20-year
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