My Maternal Line



The WHITTAM name has been in the Burnley area of Lancashire for centuries with the first appearance of the name in about 1300 AD in Cliffe, Lancashire which is near Whalley. Burnley is in "the land of the weavers", where the craft flourished due to the climate, long before the industry was mechanised during the industrial revolution. When you look back on old records it almost seems that every family in the area was involved in either weaving or farming and so it continued until relatively recent times when the cotton industry began to die in Lancashire. It was no different in my line of Whittams.

FREDERICK WHITTAM - My grandfather

My maternal grandfather, FREDERICK WHITTAM (1895-1958) was born in Burnley, the youngest of seven children. He grew up with a yen to become a soldier and regularly ran away to lie about his age and join up. He would always be returned to his family, his lies not having been particularly convincing. However, when he was old enough his father took him down to the enlistment office and signed him up as a boy soldier with parental approval. Grandpa always said he was the black sheep of the family so perhaps the parental approval was easily obtained.
FREDERICK "TITCH" WHITTAM joined the East Lancs Regiment (the Lilywhites) and as well as being promoted in the field, he was boxing champ for his regiment. His relations with his mother became a little strained after he went missing in action a few times. Each time his mum would claim on his life insurance and then get a little annoyed that he would turn up and she would have to repay it. He married ELIZABETH ANN JACKSON and had three children. When home on leave he used to regale his children with tales of his exploits in West Africa involving Big Chief Knockupafour and how he (grandpa) once put his hand down a leopards throat, grabbing its tale and turning it inside out.
His nickname was Titch because he wasn’t particularly tall and he would tell a story of how he met King Edward VIII, who said “At last I meet someone shorter than myself” but, after tales of Big Chief Knockupafour and the leopard, who knows…..

Frederick’s parents were JOHN SERVIUS WILLIAM WHITTAM (b1862) and ADELAIDE ELIZABETH COCKER,(b1864 )both of whom were born, raised, married and died in Burnley. They raised seven children in total – Cissie, James Albert, William, Edith, Servius, Thomas and Frederick .
(Cissie married Bob Sergeant and had one son, James Albert married and had one daughter, William had no children, Edith married Davis Alston and had three children, Servius married May and had one daughter and Thomas married Lilian and had three children.)

John Servius was a cotton weaver and he and Adelaide lived their lives in the Habergham Eaves area of Burnley which, even now, consists of row upon row of cobbled streets and terraced cottages that were built by the mill owners for their workers but many of the streets that John and Adelaide lived on were pulled down to make way for the motorway that now runs past Burnley. My grandpa would tell stories of how, as a child, he might come home from school one day to find the family had done a flit with the handcart to escape the rent man.
John Servius had Parkinsons Disease and my mother can remember sitting on his lap and watching his hands shake. His chest would also “squeak” as he breathed (presumably a legacy from a lifetime in the mills) and she would ask him what the noise was. He would tell her that he had a kitten in his waistcoat. Mum has few memories of her grandmother Adelaide but she does recall her being a short woman with a very big bosom and you could never sit on her lap because of it.

John Servius William Whittam’s father was a JOHN WHITTAM (b1835), another Burnley lad, cotton weaver and lifelong Habergham Eaves resident.
He had started work in the mills at a young age, as was common at that time. Children would often go to school for a couple of hours in the mornings and then be off to the mills in the afternoon to learn their trade.
He was one of three children and only 12 when his father died. His sister KEZIA was 10 and his brother JAMES was only 4 so there was probably an increased pressure for him to start work young, out of financial necessity higher that the norm.
John married a DINAH MOORHOUSE of Skipton when he was 27 and moved from Fulledge St to Aqueduct St where their eldest child, John Servius William was born. John and Dinah had been well on the way to producing their first child by the time they married, with only a couple of months between marriage and first baby. Shotgun weddings were far more common than supposed but usually happened much earlier on in the pregnancies.
I was a little surprised at this wedding being so close to the birth. After doing some digging about, I realised that the Whittams were Anglican and the Moorhouses were Primitive Methodists with John and Dinah eventually being married in the Primitive Methodist Chapel. Religious differences were far stronger in those days and I suspect that there might have been some conflict about the proposed marriage until it got to the stage where something really had to be done. Or perhaps I would just prefer to believe that, than think that my great great grandparents just weren’t too keen on getting hitched to each other.
I was quite shocked when reading the 1901 census to find that Dinah was, by then, a widow of 63 years of age and still a cotton weaver but living in Burnley Union Workhouse, Briercliffe Rd. My shock was primarily because her surviving children did not have her living with them. Surely, where there were a fair number of children then a granny living with you could only be a help ? Especially in those days when family was of far more importance than it seems to be today. My shock was further compounded when I found that her elder brother was also still alive and yet she was resident in a workhouse. I could not think of any reason other than perhaps she was difficult to live with. I mentioned this to my mother and it seemed to trigger off a memory and she said that when she was a child and became "hornery and argumentative" her parents would say "Oh dear, she is doing a Dinah". So, perhaps she really was difficult in the extreme.

By the time John and Dinah married, younger brother James and sister Kezia were both already married. Kezia had married a JOHN HOLDEN of Barrowford, probably in about 1859, and went on to have 5 children ( Martha J, John William, Albert E, Frederick Henry & Maretta Holden). By 1881 all the kids were still unmarried and living at home in Print St, Habergham Eaves but of course, 20 years later, in 1901 things had changed substantially.

Back in Fulledge St, the younger brother JAMES WHITTAM had married a JANE MYERS (from Skipton).


Jane Myers

They may have had a son Ambrose who died whilst young but by 1881 they had five children with probably the most adventurous names ever experienced in the Whittam line – Rhoda, Roderick, Isabella, Manasseh and Minella.

To date, I know little about James’s descendants except for those through his daughter ISABELLA WHITTAM.
She was born in Fulledge St, where the family were living with James and John’s mother Martha and John himself. (After John married Martha went to live with him and Dinah, probably because there was initially more room or perhaps, in light of recent discoveries, Jane and Dinah just did not get along).
By 1901, James had died and Jane Myers had married again and lived at 20 Grimshaw St as Jane Rushworth. Minella ( or Minnetta as stated in the 1901 census) was 20, unmarried and living with mum.

The eldest, Rhoda, seems to have died at some stage as there is no trace in 1901 of anyone called Rhoda born at an appropriate date.
Roderick was married and begun a family as had his brother Manasseh.
Isabella, in due course, married WILLIAM COATES and had two sons, Arthur and Ernest, both born in Burnley. About 1911, Isabella and William Coates upped sticks and moved their family to the USA, where their descendants still live.

John, Kezia and James’s parents were (another) JOHN WHITTAM (1791 – 1847) and MARTHA WOOD (b1804).
Martha had been born in Twiston which is a small hamlet at the base of Pendle Hill in Lancashire. She was christened in Downham church and the church records show her to have been the daughter of a William Wood, (who was a miller) and his wife Martha. They had two other children William and Sally.
At some stage Martha moved nearer the mill town and she married John Whittam probably around 1830, though I have yet to find details of her marriage to John.

I also suspect that John may have been married before but tracing his birth is proving to be something of a trial, primarily because of his being called John but also because of illiteracy, the name was sometimes spelt Whitham.
I suspect that he might have been born in Mere Clough to a LAWRENCE WHITTAM and NANCY BERRY of Worsthorne, near Burnley. There is also a possible candidate in the Colne area and much more digging has to be done to clarify where John was born and who his parents were.
In 1835 his occupation was weaver but by 1841 he had become a labourer. Mechanisation of the mills was taking place during the late 1820’s and it was likely that John was a weaver of the craftsman type, skilled in the use of the handloom. The handloomers were gradually forced out with the industrial revolution and so it is possible that he was forced into labouring. There had been many riots in Burnley amongst the handloomers, during the late 20s and perhaps he was involved in those, though his name does not appear amongst those who were at the core of the riots.
John died in 1848, aged 57 (of tuberculosis), in Rose Hill, Habergham Eaves and Martha found herself a widow at the age of 43, with three young children to feed. In 1848 she married a WILLIAM WOOLNER ( or Walner), a recent widower with two young children but she was widowed again a few years later. The later census returns show her as Martha Whittam but the name Woolner did reappear in an unusual way a few generations down the line.

As a child, my mother was told, by her parents, that John Servius William Whittam had wanted one of his children to be called Mona after his grandmother, Martha Mona. When I started tracing back on the Whittam line, I spent ages searching for a Martha Mona but could never find her. Eventually, with some help from a kind and experienced family historian, we established beyond a doubt that there was no Martha Mona and that John Servius’s grandmother was definitely Martha Wood.
For some time I puzzled over the name Mona and where it had come from and then one day, as I looked at the copy of her marriage certificate to William Woolner, it dawned on me. The certificate was handwritten and the surname Woolner had been mis-spelt as WOONER and looked just like Mona. So, my mother or her sister could easily have been called Mona for no good reason.
One recent discovery confirmed a suspicion I had had for some time, that Martha had been married before she married John. The birth certificate of their son James shows that between being Martha Wood and Martha Whittam, she was Martha Clayton. The LDS site states that Martha Clayton and John Whittam married on the 15th November 1830 in Clitheroe. This would have made Martha about 26 when she married John so there would not appear to have been any surviving children from her previous marriage.

There are some stories handed down through the Whitttams, that may or may not be true. One day I may be able to find out.
The first was that the Whittams are descended from Alice Nutter, one of the infamous Pendle witches who was hung in Lancaster during the reign of James I.
The second was that the Whittams are descended from Squire Cunliffe of Wycoller Hall, near Burnley. The Cunliffe’s were a colourful family and Wycoller Hall was the basis of the Hall that Charlotte Bronte wrote about in Jane Eyre. There are indeed Whittams who have married Nutters and Cunliffes but whether it was these ones is another matter. As I went to the school that Charlotte attended, it would be a rather nice little loop but if either (or both) of these tales turned out to be true it would be a rather nice bit of colour in the Whittam line.

On the other hand, it might just be a case of another tale of Big Chief Knockupafour……….


If you should happen to be a Witham or Whittam of Burnley origins, please do email me !