The Hadwen Family of Lancashire

Agnes McCooey and James Threlfall

Agnes was born Agnes Toole at Bilston near Wolverhampton in the second quarter of 1868. She was the daughter of Michael Toole, an immigrant from Ireland, and came to Barrow when Michael moved his family there sometime between 1879, when his youngest child Patrick was born at Bilston, and 1881 when the census places the family at Barrow. There they settled at 19 Napier Street where they lived from 1889 until 1904. Agnes was living with him there when both her first two sons, Patrick and Thomas, were born in 1889 and 1891. Their father was Owen McCooey, an Irishman who came to England sometime after 1881. Shortly after Thomas’s birth Agnes and her family left Napier Street for another house in Barrow, and soon after that Agnes parted from Owen. By 1895 she was a housekeeper at the Bigland Hall estate, living in Lady Syke House, Upper Holker. Agnes later said Owen had died, but I can find no record of either his death or their marriage. At Lady Syke House on 11 March 1895 Agnes gave birth to a son, Henry James McCooey, whose father she did not identify. After Henry’s birth she left Lady Syke House and by the time her next child, Agnes, was born on 9 December 1896, she was living at 5 Canal Street. Agnes was still living there when Elizabeth was born in May 1899 but left very soon after, since the Furness Directory for 1899 gives the occupant of 5 Canal Street as a Mrs Owen. Agnes had moved to Trinkelt Cottages in Ulverston when her last child, Annie was born on 1 March 1901. As with Henry, Agnes did not name the father of Agnes, Elizabeth, or Annie on their birth certificates and she gave her profession as housekeeper on all four. Her parents were still living in Barrow during all these years and on good enough terms to take in her son Thomas in 1901, but they were not able to do much more, and both died in Roose workhouse within a few months of each other in 1911.

Agnes tried to keep her family together. In the 1901 census she reported that all six of her children were living with her in Trinkelt Cottages, although two were also reported to be elsewhere. Michael Toole, her father, said Thomas was with him at 19 Napier Street on census night, whilst Daniel Crellin reported Elizabeth as a visitor named Elizabeth Crellin at his house in Dalton. In the 1911 census Agnes reported that four of her six children were living with her at 65 Walney Road, Barrow. The exceptions were Elizabeth, then definitely living with Daniel Crellin, and Thomas who had emigrated to America in April 1910. There he at first lived with his aunt, Agnes’s younger sister Ellen Carter, in Braintree, Massachusetts. Thomas had previously visited New York in 1906 and his immigration record gives the only physical description I have found of any of the McCooeys: 5 ft 10 in, brown hair, grey eyes, medium complexion.

Agnes the mother must have found it easier to keep her family together after she married a much older man, James Threlfall, at Dalton Parish Church on 30 September 1903, a marriage not announced in the Dalton Guardian. James was born in the fourth quarter of 1837 at Ulverston and had been married to Martha Elizabeth Greenwood from March 1864 until her death from a stroke on 30 March 1903. They had had four children, Edward Greenwood Threlfall born in Dalton on 18 August 1866, John Henry Threlfall born in Upper Holker on 10 October 1874, Mary Greenwood Threlfall born in Lower Allithwaite on 24 January 1881, and Dora Jane Threlfall born in Barrow on 22 December 1869. James made his living from music moving frequently between addresses in northern Lancashire. In December 1860 when he married his first wife Mary Nicholson he was an organist at Hawkshead, and the next year he had a music shop there and was the organist at a church in Bare Street. By the time his first wife died of cancer in April 1863 he had moved to Ulverston. When he married his second wife Martha Greenwood in March 1864 he was a music teacher in Barrow-in-Furness, a profession he followed for a long time, acting as such in Dalton in 1866, in Barrow in 1869, in Dalton again in 1871, in Upper Holker in 1874, in Lower Allithwaite in 1881, and in Barrow from 1891 until at least 1901. In Barrow he lived at various addresses in St Paul’s parish: 47 East Mount (1891), 26 Newbarns Village (1901), and 19 Victoria Avenue in 1903, by which time he was again an organist. He was still an organist when he died of cancer on 27 June 1908 in St Albans at the house of his daughter Dora and her schoolmaster husband, Stephen Ralph Unwin. He was buried in Ulverston cemetery three days after his death in the grave that held his second wife Martha Elizabeth Greenwood and his son John Henry Threlfall who had died of appendicitis in 1902. James had two death notices in successive weeks in the Millom News. The second was signed by Agnes, but the first made no mention of her. He left no will. I believe that James was the father of the four children Agnes bore between 1895 and 1901. Firstly he married Agnes, a much younger woman, only six months after his first wife’s death. Secondly the first child had the middle name James, and it was common to link an illegitimate to its father through a middle name. Thirdly there is a tradition amongst James Threlfall’s Peverley descendants that he had an affair with a servant, and Agnes described herself as a housekeeper on the birth certificates of her four youngest children. Fourthly the youngest daughter was called Annie Dora Threlfall, Dora being a common name in the Threlfall family. Fifthly two of the children, Henry and Annie called themselves Henry and Annie Threlfall from the 1920s onward.

Agnes lived at 65 Walney Road in Barrow until about 1922 when she moved to live with daughter Agnes at 25 Walney Road, the home of the Rogers family into which daughter Agnes married in 1917. When her son Patrick got married in 1929 she went to live with him at 5 The Strand, again in Barrow, and she stayed with him for the rest of her life. She remained in touch with Agnes the daughter and died on 16 August 1937 when a heart condition overcame her whilst waiting for a bus to take her home after visiting Agnes. She had been receiving treatment for her heart condition for 16 months at the time of her death. She is buried as Agnes Threlfall in Thorncliffe cemetery in Barrow.

James Threlfall came from a musical family. His father Joseph was recorded in the 1851 and 1861 censuses as a grocer and shoemaker living in Swan Street, Ulverston, but James described him as an organ builder when he married Agnes McCooey in September 1903. Three of the five sons who survived to maturity earned their living from music. His brother Arthur described himself as a music teacher in every census from 1871 to 1911, and like James was living at a different address each time. Although Arthur’s wife, Anne Russell, was the daughter of a wealthy bobbin manufacturer, William Russell, he does not seem to have benefitted from their money. James’s brother Joseph (1829-96) was a shoemaker living with his father in 1851, a music teacher living in Market Street, Ulverston in 1861, a piano dealer living in Market Street in 1871, and a piano dealer resident at The Vines, Ford Park in 1881. He retired as a piano dealer in about 1884 but was still living at The Vines in 1891 and died there in 1896. He used the money he made as a music dealer to speculate very successfully in land in Askam in the 1870s when he moved to Ford Park, a very prestigious area. He may have been assisted by Joseph Sharpe a pioneer of the iron industry in Askam who was married to his wife’s sister Mary. Joseph Threlfall had been an overseer of the poor and when he became wealthy he was elected to Ulverston’s Board of Guardians on which he served from 1886 until his death in 1896. He held radical political views1 and Canal Street, where Agnes McCooey was living for at least the last 18 months of Joseph’s life is only 5 minutes’ walk from Ford Park. Agnes was a housekeeper at this time, but I can find no evidence that she was Joseph’s housekeeper.

Patrick, the eldest of Agnes’s children, served as a Pioneer in World War I, was gassed, wounded in the head, and discharged in September 1918 as physically unfit for further service. On his discharge he seems to have lived with his sister Agnes and her family at 25 Walney Road until he married Edith Butterworth, the daughter of a shipyard foreman driller on 16 November 1929. Patrick was then almost 40 and Edith was pregnant with, or had just given birth to, their first child, Peter. They went on to have two more children Betty (b. 1931) and Kenneth (b.1934). At the time of his suicide in April 1938 Patrick was an unemployed shipyard labourer living with his family at 5 The Strand in Barrow - this had included his mother until her death eight months earlier. Patrick experienced frequent depressions as a consequence of his war service and had seriously considered suicide in 1936.

Thomas McCooey seems to have led an itinerant life in the USA, being a labourer in Massachusetts in April 1910, a farm labourer in Greenville, Maine in 1917, and then a clerk in a large New York boarding house in 1920. By December 1922 he had become settled enough in Hoboken, New Jersey to offer a home to his brother-in-law Cyril Slee when the latter came out to the USA to seek his fortune. Agnes the daughter married Albert Ernest Rogers, an iron worker on 11 April 1917 when she was 20. She gave her father as Patrick McCooey, a deceased labourer, but I do not believe this identification: the name is also that of her eldest half-brother, and I can find no record that a Patrick McCooey died in Lancashire between 1896 and 1917. The couple set themselves up in Albert’s house at 25 Walney Road and had one daughter, Winifred, born in 1920. They moved to 28 Cook Street in Barrow sometime between 1938 and 1945 and Agnes died there of heart disease in September 1946. Her husband continued to live there until his own death in 1975, and Winifred lived with him throughout that time. She married Felix John Rawlinson in 1943 and in the house they shared with Albert they raised two sons, Kevin John (b. 1947) and Gerard Michael (1958-2001). Felix Rawlinson died in 1975, but Winifred and her elder son were still living at 28 Cook Street in 2000. Henry James McCooey survived the first world war and was living with his mother at 65 Walney Road from 1920 to 1923 when he was calling himself Henry James Threlfall. He married Lizzie Sawyer in January 1923 and died in Barrow-in-Furness in 1966. Annie McCooey lived with her mother until she married in Cyril Slee in 1921 at which time she was calling herself Annie Threlfall. The family home at 25 Walney Road then contained Agnes the mother, Agnes the daughter and her husband, Henry, Annie and her new husband. It was perhaps overcrowded and this may have been why Cyril, an engine driver, went to the USA in December 1922. He was received there by Annie’s second son Thomas but he later returned to Barrow-in Furness. Annie died there in 1973 as did Cyril in April 1985.

As for James Threlfall’s other children, the eldest Edward worked all his life for the Furness Railway Company. He joined as a booking clerk and progressed to auditor in 1896. He died, comfortably off, in June 1955. James’s second son, John Henry, was in 1901 a plumber lodging in Ambleside with a family to whom he was not related, and he was still a plumber when he died of appendicitis in Ulverston Cottage Hospital on 21 April 1902, about a year before the double marriage of his sisters and the death of his mother. James’s two daughters, Mary and Dora, were both married in St Paul’s church in Barrow on 3 February 1903, about six weeks before their mother died. Mary married John Peverley, a turner from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and died in Coventry on 31 August 1961. Dora married Stephen Ralph Unwin, a schoolmaster in a private school who had been educated at Selwyn College, Cambridge and went on to teach in St Albans where he published a short English grammar in 1912. At some point he joined the army and acquired the rank of Lt-Colonel, and he was described as such in his will when he died in 1951. Dora died in 1955.