Currans and Rowbothams ..... the story so far
I first started researching my family history when I was at school, starting with the Stott side and managed to get back to around 1800 very quickly; unfortunately I have never managed to get any further. The name is common in the area, the people were poor weavers and there is no evidence of where the family came from before they appear in Birch. I then turned to the Ashtons, the Holts, the Walkers, the Davenports and the Darlingtons - all on my dad's side - but didn't for the first ten years even think of researching my mum's family because I had always been told both her parents had been given away as children and my grand-dad in particular had never known his real family.
It was in the early 1980s when I finally went to London (there was no choice in those days) and ordered Leonard Curran's birth certificate. My mum was amazed to find that her real grandparents were Eli and Sarah Curran of Hampden Street, Heywood.
A SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD
I've been told that, whenever my grand-dad, Leonard Curran Rowbotham, was asked why his middle name was Curran he always answered "there must be a raisin for it". The reason was that he was born a Curran but was taken in by James and Emily Rowbotham (nee Oddie) when he was only two years old, on the death of both his parents at the turn of the last century. He knew next to nothing about his family and my mother and her brothers and sisters grew up believing they had no family on their dad's side.
Len Curran at two years old and the "adoption" agreement
Eli and Sarah Curran (nee Addis) died in their 40s within a year of each other. Picture a 2-up 2-down terraced cottage in Hargreaves Street in 1901 with Eli dying upstairs of consumption and four small children presumably being looked after by 14 year old Elizabeth Harriet. The two eldest sons were lodging in a house on Green Lane. On the death of Eli, the young orphans were given away by their eldest brother, Arthur Edwin Curran. I knew of the "adoption" of Len by the Rowbothams and have a copy of the legal document in which Arthur had signed away his brother.
Len's sister Lily was taken by the same family as he, when she was four years old and Len never knew until much later that Lily had been his sister, not his cousin. Her adoptive parents, Robert and Maria Bottoms (nee Oddie) had been living on Tower Street but moved away to Chadderton at this time and Lily appears in the 1911 Census with Maria as "Lilly Bottoms" living at 41 Wellington Street. When Len's first daughter was born in 1923, he named her Lily after his sister.
PHOTO HERE OF MARIA BOTTOMS
Meanwhile back in Heywood, eldest son Arthur Edwin Curran married his first wife and it appears he took his eldest sister, Elizabeth to live with him and his new wife, Annie. Another sister, Ethel, was taken by the Lucases who lived across the road. There was also a teen-aged boy, Oswald. At this time in Heywood lung related illnesses like TB and phthisis were rife in the factories and only two of the Curran children lived to adulthood, as Oswald, Elizabeth and Ethel died over the next few years and are buried in the same grave with their parents in Heywood Cemetery and three earlier children. Arthur was present at all their deaths. Over ten years, Arthur Edwin Curran lost his parents, all his brothers and sisters (except for Len), his wife and three out of four of his children. By 1910 he had only one little girl, Annie - and Len of course, who he had signed away his rights to in 1901, who worked at the same factory and who had been forbidden to talk to him.
PARAGRAPH HERE ABOUT PHTHISIS EPIDEMIC IN HEYWOOD
Len with two arms and Len with one arm
Len came home from school one day and told James and Emily that a man had approached him, given him some money and told him he was his brother. They said he was a bad man and he was told not to have anything more to do with him. During this time Len was living at Railway Street and his adoptive father worked at the family brewery. Arthur and his daughter Annie were in Marlborough Street, Hopwood. In 1914, Lily Curran died aged 17 at the Bottoms' home in Chadderton and Len was told to attend her funeral, which he could not understand as none of his other cousins attended.
Mutual Mills today
Len joined up in 1916 when he was 17 and was teaching someone his job at Mutual Mills in Heywood when he caught his hand in a machine and his arm was taken off at the elbow. The family said later that he was the only person ever to have his call-up papers and his demob papers through the same week.
While he was in hospital recovering, his brother Arthur came to see him, presumably told him his story, that he was indeed his brother and that Lily had been his sister. Len later told his family that Arthur had brought some indoor fireworks for him and set them on fire in the hearth; he also promised to come back but never did. Arthur married again shortly after this and had two sons of his own. He called the first Arthur and the second Leonard.
Meanwhile, the Bottoms family in Chadderton were having their own share of bad luck. Robert Bottoms died in 1914, then Lily Curran the same year when she was only 17 of a lung related illness, Maria's son Ben was killed in action in 1917 and another son, Robert died from wounds in 1918 but it appears in her short life Lily had had a close family around her of adoptive brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins.
THE ROWBOTHAMS COME TO HEYWOOD
Going back a generation, Len's adoptive grandfather, another James Rowbotham, had moved to Heywood in 1864. The family were originally tanners in Kendal and had moved to Manchester around 1820, living in the area near Walker's Croft where Hunt's Bank (later Victoria) Station was later built in 1844. [HERE A PARAGRAPH ABOUT HUNT'S BANK STATION BEING BUILT AND AREA BEING CLEARED).
In his early days in Heywood, James worked as a scudder at Littons Tannery, a fairly menial and back-breaking job. He brought his two sons, John and Edward, with him to Heywood and his pregnant wife, Mary followed later. By the time Mary died in 1885, James had six surviving sons - Edward, Henry, James, William, George and Charles. Within two months of Mary's death James had married again to an Elizabeth Street, a domestic servant and they were running a greengrocery business in Heywood centre, near the Duke of Wellington. Around 1890 he had a visit from the landlord of the Staff of Life on Hardfield Street, Jack Howarth. He was in the habit of taking bets from his customers and on that day every single horse had come up and he was unable to pay out all the winnings. He borrowed £400 from James but, instead of repaying the loan, he later gave the family some property on Railway Street consisting of a house and a shop, and taught the Rowbotham lads how to brew ale. This is how the Sun Brewery came to be. James' sons ripped out the inside of the house, installed stilling equipment and opened the shop as a off licence. I have no idea how James Rowbotham could have come up with £400 in 1890. The home brewed ale was sold in the street from a cart - 6d per gallon - in Castleton on Thursdays, Rochdale on Fridays and Bury on Saturdays. After a week's work at the brewery, the sons frequently got drunk and were hosed down in the yard by their stepmother. The brewery closed down around the end of the First War along with other small breweries in the area.
Reading between the lines and using the records available and information grudgingly given to me by Annie Babut who was the grand-daughter of James Rowbotham and the daughter of his son Henry, I came to the conclusion that the Rowbotham sons were big fish in the very small pond of Heywood. James Rowbotham himself had moved away from the rest of his family in Manchester to make his own way in Heywood. Over the next 30 years he grew from being a menial worker in a tannery to having property and a business of his own to leave to his sons. Mrs Babut told me that it was "Lloyd George's fault" that the brewery had had to close after WW1; it certainly doesn't seem to have been James Rowbotham's. According to his obituary in 1913 he was a well respected member of the community and a member of the local bowling club. BIT HERE FROM OBITUARY ABOUT THE FUNERAL.
As for his six sons, Edward was dismissed from the Oldham police force for being drunk on parade or not turning up at all; William was arrested for "furious driving" of a horse and cart through Heywood town centre in 1885 and James (according to Mrs Babut) spent many a happy hour on Saturday afternoon trashing the inside of the Freemasons Arms Hotel and paying for the damage out of his own pocket. Edward's son, James Edward, was supposed to have been caught stealing a watch and some money from his grandfather and because of this his branch of the family was written out of James' Will. George Rowbotham had originally been an executor of his father's Will but was then dropped and a nephew brought in instead. Henry, the father of Annie Babut, does seem to have been his father's rock; Charlie Rowbotham was killed in action in the First War and John died of tonsilitus when he was 18.
This is the family that brought up Leonard Curran. When old James Rowbotham died in 1913, his will stated that Leonard Curran and another child, Florrie Hardman, who had been adopted by Charlie Rowbotham and his wife, were to be treated as his natural grandchildren .... and yet Len, in 1930 with one arm and a wife and five children, had to take the family to Court in order to receive his inheritance. This caused a rift between him and the rest of the family. In 192?? Leonard Curran had married Annie Clegg, his adoptive mother, Emily, died at 115 Starkey Street, and James moved in with his step-mother, Elizabeth at 40 Tower Street leaving the house on Starkey Street to his son's new family. Len, Annie and their five children, Jim, Lily, Joyce (my mum), Connie and Harry, lived quite an insular existence first on Starkey Street, then in the off licence on Queen Street that Len bought with the £3,000 he inherited. My mum told me it was as if they had become rich overnight, that the new house had electricity, unlike the old one.
Mum playing in the shadow of Mutual Mills
There must have been some contact though, because in the early 1930s Uncle Jim and Auntie Lily used to visit the house at 40 Tower Street where James's widow, Elizabeth Rowbotham lived till her death. Lily said they had to stand up to eat their dinner and both courses were served on the same plate. When they came away, Jim was always given a penny and Lily nothing. She also told me there was a pair of man's shoes peeping out from under a curtain in the hallway that always frightened her as a child; they would have belonged to James Rowbothm, now deceased.
THE CURRAN CONNECTION
That's the Rowbotham clan but obviously, I wanted to find out where grand-dad's parents, Eli and Sarah had come from and what their story was. I have never been able to find where Sarah Addis came from when she arrived in Oldham in the 1870s before she was married to Eli in 1878. They appear to have moved to wherever the work was, in 1881 in Aspull where Eli was a miner and later in Heywood where he is described as a labourer and a joiner. At one time they were members of the Swedenborgian Church in Heywood where two of their children were baptised. They were poor people: they lived, had many children and then they died; and there is very little evidence of their lives. Arthur Edwin Curran really did the orphans a favour by giving them away, otherwise they would have ended up in the workhouse.
However, Eli had not been an only child; he had three brothers and a sister living locally, one in Middleton with a big family of his own. This younger brother, James Frederick Curran was a tailor living just four miles away, which meant Len had at least one uncle and aunt, and at least six cousins. Most were still alive when Leonard's children were born, but they grew up never knowing them.
Eli's parents were William Curran, a tailor from Middleton and Elizabeth Cockcroft, whose family had moved to Manchester from West Yorkshire around 1820. William and Elizabeth were married in 1844 and by 1851 were living on Middleton High Street with their first two children. Although I know where the family were living in 1861 I have never been able to find them in the Census. However, within the first few months of 1870 the three eldest Curran children, George Henry, John Williams and Mary Emma, were married to Heywood people so I assume the family had already moved to Heywood by then. So, the 1871 shows the three newly married couples, along with Elizabeth Curran and her two youngest children, Eli and James Frederick living on Cowburns Street (now King Street), but no sign of her husband.
William actually died at an Oldham address in 1878 with his son, James Frederick in attendance. It appears he and Elizabeth hadn't been together for some time and a possible reason was that he seems to have spent some time in prison. Two sentences in prison for larceny (and whipped on one occasion), acquitted in 1860 but if this is true, how could his son James Frederick have been born if his father was imprisoned for four years? Another mystery.
To be continued ......................