The York Family (CHART 5)
The first TATTERSFIELD records in York were the marriages, in St Mary, Castlegate, York, of brothers JOHN and JOB in 1803 and 1804 respectively. Both were described in the baptism records of their children as being sons of THOMAS TATTERSFIELD, labourer, of Brotherton (East of Leeds). No such family can be found in Brotherton parish records. However, in Dewsbury Parish Church, as discussed above, a THOMAS TATTERSFIELD married Mary Crossley in 1770. Their children, apart from some who died as infants, were JOHN (born 1771), CHARLES (born 1773), JOB (born 1779) and possibly two daughters. It is confidently considered that the JOHN and JOB above were the same as the two who were married in York.
Both were watermen and they respectively had three and nine children who were variously watermen, bricklayers and labourers. A number of their descendants still live in York today. One , John Thomas, emigrated to America in 1886, and lived in Chicago.
The Hull Family (CHART 6)
The Hull family was started by MARK TATTERSFIELD, who was the second son of DAVID TATTERSFIELD and Martha Hall, who married in Dewsbury Parish Church on 3rd December, 1771. Unusually for the family, MARK was a soldier at one time, in the West Yorkshire Regiment. His wife Hannah had seven children. The first three were born in Maker (Cornwall), Leeds (Yorkshire) and Dover (Kent), and the last four in Hull, East Yorkshire. The details of MARK’s military record have not been found, but it seems that he was stationed on the South coast of England during the time when an invasion by the forces of Napoleon was feared. Baptism dates show that he settled in Hull some time between 1813 and 1815.
It is an interesting feature of the families who moved away from the Dewsbury area that a particular Christian name would be popular. In the Hull family, there were boys called DANIEL in four successive generations, and the name MARK appeared in three. These names were not used in other regional branches, except that there were two DANIELs in the Leeds family.
Descendants of Mark still live in the Hull area.
Infant mortality was commonplace in Victorian England. Spare a thought, though, for JOSEPH and his wife Alice Maud Gibson who married in 1882. Five of their nine children did not live to their second birthday.
The Leeds Family (CHART 8)
SAMUEL TATTERSFIELD married Rachel Senior in Dewsbury Parish Curch on 9th April, 1786. Their first seven children were baptised in Dewsbury (three died in infancy) and the last two were baptised in Leeds, indicating that the family moved the eight-or-so miles to Leeds at some time between 1799 and 1803. SAMUEL died in Leeds in 1840, aged 81, after falling down stairs.
The use of the first name DANIEL for the next two generations suggests some linkage with the Hull branch of the family.
One of SAMUEL’s sons was JOHN, who was a schoolmaster in Huddersfield. His wife died early of English Cholera and they had only one daughter, FANNY. JOHN never re-married and ran a boarding school which was mentioned in trade directories of the time.
A combination over the years of a prevalence of daughters, and the early death of many of the sons, limited the expansion of the name TATTERSFIELD in the Leeds area, and latterly some have moved away. However some descendants still live in the area.
The Lancashire Family (CHART 9)
This branch was started by JOHN from Littleborough, Rochdale, Lancashire, who married Hannah Hollas in Halifax, West Yorkshire in 1816. Their five (or possibly six) children were baptised in Sowerby in West Yorkhire.
For a long time it was a puzzle as to why a TATTERSFIELD at this time should have come from Lancashire. The answer seems to be that JOHN was described as a boatman or waterman. The first canal cut through the Pennine Hills was the Rochdale Canal, opened in 1798. It connected the existing canal system of Yorkshire with the Bridgewater Canal at Manchester in Lancashire. Its route passed through Rochdale, Littleborough, Sowerby, Halifax, Mirfield and Dewsbury, thus indicating that JOHN, though resident in Lancashire at the time of his marriage, could well have come from Yorkshire.
The origin of JOHN was learned from the will of WILLIAM TATTERSFIELD, a tailor, who died in Drighlington, near to Dewsbury, in 1838, aged 47. He left all his assets to his wife Sarah. After her death they were to be “shared equally between the children of my late brother JOHN and my brother GEORGE.” Nowhere could a family with sons WILLIAM, JOHN and GEORGE be found. However, JAMES TATTERSFIELD and Mary Dransfield, who married in Dewsbury in 1788 had sons JOHN and WILLIAM, born in 1789 and 1791. It was found that Mary had an illegitimate son called George in 1785, 3 years before she married JAMES. Hence the three boys would have been brought up as brothers.
This JAMES was a witness at the wedding of THOMAS in Dewsbury in 1770, whose descendants became the York branch of the family. This points to a close tie originally between the families of York and Lancashire.
Strong features of the Lancashire family were the use of ELLIS as a Christian name in three generations, and the fact that a number of the men were tailors.
One of the ELLISes married and left his wife and two children after two or three years of marriage. She returned to her mother. Six years later he married again, apparently bigamously. He used a slightly different set of Christian names, but his signature on the two wedding certificates was clearly by the same hand! After one child was born, the second marriage broke up. Perhaps the “wife” discovered she was not lawfully married, because she married again. However, no later trace has been found of ELLIS!
Joseph (1761-1835) (CHART 11)
DESCENDANTS OF A MIRFIELD MARRIAGE OF JOSEPH (AN OILCRUSHER) 1761-1835
The name JOSEPH was relatively common in the early Dewsbury and Heckmondwike families. In this case JOSEPH and SARAH, both called TATTERSALL, were married in Mirfield Parish Church on 12th March 1809. Later records give the surname as TATTERSFIELD. Though they both had the same surname, their respective parents have not been identified with complete certainty. Chart 16 gives a hypothesis.
JOSEPH was described as an oilcrusher at his marriage and at his death. Both he and SARAH died in a workhouse, as did one of their daughters. Of their seven children, two, and possibly three, went to live near Glossop in Derbyshire and two were married in the parish church there.
The remainder of the family became centred on Gawthorpe, Ossett, adjacent to Dewsbury. It has been traced for five generations, down to the early part of the twentieth century. It is not known whether any descendants still live there. Certainly there are none with the surname Tattersfield.
Abraham (c1780-1848) Mirfield (CHART 15).
Abraham was variously called Farmer and Labourer in Mirfield. He and his small family at different times were named as TATTERSALL and TATTERSFIELD.
He married Elizabeth Gains in 1804 as TATTERSALL. However, in the Census of 1841 he was TATTERSFIELD. Her death in 1826 and his in 1848 were recorded as TATTERSFIELD. He remarried in 1837 to Hannah Hallas, as TATTERSFIELD.
His first two sons were baptised in 1805 and 1808 as TATTERSALL, while the others were baptised in 1813 and 1824 as TATTERSFIELD.
The second son, John, was baptised in 1808 as TATTERSALL, but married in 1832 as TATTERSFIELD. Only three months after his marriage he was sent to prison, as TATTERSALL, and died there as TATTERSFIELD in the cholera epidemic of 1832. His daughter was baptised in Brotherton in 1832 as TATTERSFIELD, and his widow Ann remarried in 1837 as TATERSFIELD.
The complex story of this family seems to indicate they changed name somewhere between 1808 and 1813, but with occasional reversions to the old name TATTERSALL.
In CHART 15A a rather speculative attempt has been made to trace the TATTERSALL ancestry of Abraham in Mirfield. It should be treated with less certainty than the other TATTERSFIELD Charts.
There are no known surviving TATTERSFIELD descendants from this family.
Header Image: A section of a print entitled 'A View of the City of York from near the confluence of the rivers Ouse and Foss, 1761', which is in the collection of the York Art Gallery. Several Tattersfields in various early Yorkshire branches of the family were watermen who may have been quite familiar with the idealized view shown here. Image courtesy of York Museums Trust :: https://yorkmuseumstrust.org.uk :: Public Domain