Kelsall - A Quaker Family

Part III

Friends throughout three centuries by Julia M. Beeden

In part II of the Kelsall Family History (1) we saw how Joseph, the younger of the two small boys rescued from London in the late Seventeenth Century by their grandmother Jennet Cragg, settled in Quernmore and Upper Wyresdale as a yeoman farmer. He married Margaret Winder of Wyresdale and they had eight children, seven of whom survived infancy.

Joseph and Margaret Kelsall's eldest son, but fifth child, was born on September 16th 1734 (2) and named Joseph after his father. He married Ellen Edmundson at Yealand Friends' Meeting House (near Carnforth) on April 6th 1774. They settled on a farm near to the Wyresdale Friends' Meeting House in Upper Wyresdale. Joseph was a farmer or husbandman all his life. His descendants were still attending the same Meeting House in 1952 (3).

Joseph and Ellen had only three children: Joseph, born September 28th 1778; Joshua, born July 27th 1781 and Dorothy, born October 27th 1789. Their eldest son Joseph died on March 31st 1802 at the age of twenty-three, having never married. He was buried on April 4th 1802 at the Wyresdale Meeting House. His father Joseph died at the age of seventy-one on April 19th 1806, and was buried at the Meeting House, two days later. David Cragg, son of Timothy of Greenbank Farm in Upper Wyresdale, noted in his Diary that a Burial Note was sent to John Procter the grave maker to prepare a grave in the Wyresdale Friends' Burial Ground. About fifty people attended the funeral of Joseph Kelsall including Molly Pye. (Molly or Mary Pye was David's intended wife despite family opposition because she was a Methodist and the family were Friends!) William Jepson preached at the funeral. It was the local custom for the family of the deceased to go round the locality inviting people to attend the funeral. Ellen, who in 1806 was described as already "old", died at the age of sixty-four on February 16th 1813 and was also buried at the Wyresdale Meeting House on February 18th.

Joshua and his sister Dorothy are known to have kept a small shop at their farm in a building with a thatched roof (2). Dorothy married a Lancaster tailor James Atkinson at Lancaster Monthly Meeting on July 10th 1817. He was a son of James and Ann Atkinson of Holme in Westmorland (5). They had three children, Ellen, Joseph and James Atkinson. The 1841 Census Returns show that James Atkinson and his wife Dorothy, aged approximately sixty-four and fifty respectively, were then living at the Wyresdale Meeting House, James still working as a tailor. Dorothy died on April 11th 1858 at the age of about seventy years.

Joshua Kelsall married a recent convert to the Society of Friends, Mary Swindlehurst, daughter of farmers Abraham and Elizabeth Swindlehurst, on July 10th 1816 at Yealand Conyers near Carnforth. At that time Joshua was described as a linen weaver but various other sources refer to him as either a husbandman or farmer throughout his life (6). As with many upland or marginal farmers in both Lancashire and Yorkshire during the last century it is quite possible that he carried on dual occupations, weather and circumstances permitting. Joshua continued to keep the shop as well as farming: he also taught the children of Friends and of other Wyresdale families for two and a half days per week and "for as much as was thought sufficient on the Sabbath Day". Until his death in 1854, September 25th, at the age of seventy-three, Joshua Kelsall maintained the first school in Upper Wyresdale. His teaching was said to be "after somewhat primitive fashion", but he was much beloved by the School and by the Meeting as a worthy man and Elder (7). Charles Holmes of the Calder Bridge Preparative Meeting at Bonds near Garstang dedicated a couplet to him in his "Lines written in an Album" on April 24th 1852:-

"There is our worthy Friend Joshua a tiller of land
And conducts a Friends School which he well understands" (8).

The Wyresdale Friends' School was endowed by the Quarterly Meeting in 1807. Sums of money for the endowment were deposited with the London and North Western Railway Company with the proviso that if the school failed to be successful then the money was to be returned to the Quarterly Meeting for the provision of another Friends' School elsewhere (9). Attendance at the school was very much greater in the earlier part of the Nineteenth Century when the population of the immediate neighbourhood was larger. When the Reverend Daniel Schofield, curate of Over Wyresdale from 1894, was writing his articles for the Lancaster Guardian attendance at the school with a good master was about thirty children (10).

Conditions in the Wyresdale Friends' School are said to have been very primitive. There were no real desks or proper pens. Instead troughs filled with sand became desks; copy books were used; writing was done with sharpened pieces of wood. The Masters at the school during the Nineteenth Century were Joshua Kelsall, James Atkinson, Wilkinson Walker, Thomas Braithwaite, William Graham, John Helliwell, and John E. Hobby (11). It is important to realise that Upper Wyresale already had another school at Abbeystead, founded as the Abbeystead Endowed School in 1674 by William Cawthorne gentleman. Among many noteworthy pupils, it was attended in the late Seventeenth Century by the John Kelsall who was to become Master of a school at Dolobran in Montgomeryshire, brother of the 'first' Joseph Kelsall of Wyresdale.

Joshua and Mary Kelsall's first two children, Ellen and Elizabeth, were born on May 10th 1817 and December 21st 1818 at their farm next to the Wyresdale Meeting House. Joshua was alternately described as a linen weaver or a husbandman, not mutually exclusive occupations, as mentioned above. In 1820 they moved up to Higher or Upper Moorhead, a farm still almost in sight of the Meeting House. During their six years tenancy of this farm they had two sons, Joseph on July 27th 1829 and Joshua on August 14th 1822. Abraham their last child arrived on May 10th 1826, the day of their removal down to Chapel House in Over Wyresdale! (12).

The 1841 Census shows Joshua and Mary living at Chapel House with a son Joseph and a daughter Elizabeth still at home; living in also were a fifteen-year-old boy James Clarkson working as a male servant and an eight-year-old girl Melicent (sic) Swindlehurst who was employed as a female servant, very likely a close relation of Mary's. Joshua and Mary lived at Chapel House for the rest of their lives. At the time of the 1851 Census the household consisted of Joshua (69), Mary (59), Elizabeth (32) and Joseph (30) their adult children who were as yet unmarried, a four-year-old grand-daughter Elizabeth who attended school, and two locally-born servants Thomas Simpson and Elizabeth Loxam aged only fourteen and twelve respectively. Mary's mother Elizabeth Swindlehurst a widow of eighty-one also lived with the family.

Chapel House was a farm rich in Quaker tradition having been earlier the home of the Cragg family. The first incumbent of Wyresdale Chapel, John Cragg, was living at Chapel House from the early 1600s. His great grand-daughter Elizabeth Cragg, who became the second wife of John Kelsall of Cheshire and London and mother of the boys Joseph and John, was born there in 1660 (13).

Joseph Kelsall, the eldest son, continued to live at and farm Chapel House after his father's death on September 25th 1854. Later on, he and his wife lived in a cottage at Catshaw Farm, not far from the Catshaw Cotton Factory; he married Ann Till, daughter of William and Ann Till and grand-daughter of James Till a Wyresdale Yeoman farmer of a very large family. At the time of the 1841 Census James aged about seventy-five years farmed at Moor Bottom Farm with his son Thomas whilst William and Ann and their family lived at Lower Emmetts Farm. William's wife Ann was the second daughter of Thomas and Jane Brewer of Brow Top Farm in Quernmore. Jane was born the elder daughter of John Jackson of Quernmore, "the honest miller", and his wife Ann, second daughter of the original Joseph Kelsall; (see family tree part). In this area many of the families were frequently inter-related, some much more closely than this example.

Joseph and Ann's son William (possibly born in 1864) married Elizabeth Mason of Kitchen Ground in Ellel: she was born on April 20th 1866, a younger daughter of George Mason and Hannah Mills his wife. The Mason family The Mason family were Lancaster undertakers and descended from George Mason who had come from Dent in Yorkshire in the late Eighteenth Century. William and Elizabeth Kelsall had a family of eight children: - George Mason, Joseph, William Till, Thomas, James, Emily, Annie (who died at sixteen years of age) and Elizabeth. They lived near the Catshaw Mill in Upper Wyresdale and at Kitchen Ground Farm in Ellel. At the time of writing this article Elizabeth is the only surviving child of this generation – I am very grateful to this Quaker lady for her kindness in providing much information and assistance for my research into this branch of the Kelsall family.

References
1. See Over Wyre Historical Journal, Vol. V, pp. 18-19.
2. Registers of the Society of Friends, Lancaster Monthly Meeting.
3. The Story of the Wyresdale Meeting House c. 1670; duplicated booklet 1952.
4. See 3. above.
5. See Friends' Register at 2. above.
6. See Friends' Registers and Census Returns, Over Wyresdale, 1841 and 1851.
7. Georgina Fandrey (nee Cragg), The Craggs of Greenbank, privately published, 1974.
8. Manuscript notebook in the possession of Mrs. E. Woodhouse of Eliel.
9. Rev. D. Schofield, Over Wyresdale, its Church, Schools and Charities, reprinted from the Lancaster Guardian, 1909.
10. ibid.
11. ibid.
12. See Friends' Registers and Meeting House booklet at 3. above.
13. See Schofield, Over Wyresdale; note 9. above.