James Bailey, blacksmith of Sheffield, and Sarah Goodlad, also of Sheffield, were married after banns on 11 December 1826 at the Parish Church of St Peter and St Paul in Sheffield, Yorkshire (now Sheffield Cathedral). James was the son of James Bailey and Mary, of Askham, Nottinghamshire. Sarah was the daughter of John Goodlad and Elizabeth Hammond, of Sheffield.
The couple will make their home in Mattersey, Nottinghamshire.
That is the substance of what the register records. Entry No. 869, page 290, Sheffield Archives & Local Studies, reference PR-138-3-22. The officiating minister was William H Vale, Assistant Minister. Both parties signed their own names, neither made a mark. The witnesses were Nathan Hampson and a second name only partially legible. Both James and Sarah were listed as of “this Parish,” meaning both had established Sheffield residence by the time they married. James was twenty-nine. Sarah was twenty-six.
James Bailey was born in Askham, Nottinghamshire, and baptized there at the parish church on 5 February 1797, the second child of James Bailey and Mary. Some list her last name as White, but no sources verify this information. His father’s trade was blacksmith, and James followed him into it. By the time he appears in Sheffield he is an established tradesman, already old enough to have made his own way in the world. His origins in Askham, a small Nottinghamshire village, and his presence in Sheffield’s industrial economy by his late twenties suggest a young man who went where the work was.
Sarah Goodlad’s story begins further back. She was born on 6 September 1800 in Rotherham, Yorkshire, the second child of John Goodlad and Elizabeth Hammond. She was baptized at the Parish Church of St Mary, Rotherham, on 30 November 1800.
John Goodlad had been baptized on 28 February 1775 at the Parish Church of St Peter, Conisbrough, the son of William Goodlad and his wife Elizabeth. He was a cabinet maker by trade, and he and Elizabeth Hammond were married on 29 July 1798 at the Parish Church of St Mary, Rotherham. Their witnesses were Thomas Hammond and Sarah Hammond, almost certainly Elizabeth’s family. Elizabeth Hammond was a Yorkshire woman, born about 1776, whose origins beyond her marriage we have not been able to trace.
The Goodlads had five children. Ann, their eldest, was born in 1798. Sarah followed in 1800, baptized at the Parish Church of St Mary, Rotherham. By 1803, the family had moved to Sheffield, and Mary Ann was baptized there on 22 July 1803 at the Parish Church of St Peter and St Paul, Sheffield (now Sheffield Cathedral). Elizabeth was baptized at the same church on 21 November 1806, and John — the youngest — on 2 July 1809, also there.
John Goodlad was a cabinet maker working in Sheffield by at least 1803, when both Mary Ann’s and Elizabeth’s baptism records note his occupation.
Tragedy struck in 1809. John Goodlad was buried on 26 September 1809 at St Peter’s Church, Conisbrough, the parish of his birth, where his parents William and Elizabeth still lived. He was thirty-five years old. The Conisbrough register describes him as “John Goodlad of Sheffield, Son of William & Elizabeth Goodlad of this parish, aged 35 years.” He left five children under the age of eleven, the youngest barely four months old.
His daughter Elizabeth, three years old, was buried at St Peter’s Church, Conisbrough on 31 December 1809. His infant son John, described in the register as son of “the late John,” was buried at St Peter’s Church, Conisbrough on 28 January 1810, aged four months. Three deaths in four months: a husband, a daughter, an infant son.
Elizabeth Hammond was widowed at approximately thirty-three with three surviving children, Ann, Sarah, and Mary Ann. She remarried on 1 April 1811 at the parish church in Tankersley, Yorkshire, to Enoch Lumb, a Sheffield blacksmith baptized on 28 February 1774 at the Parish Church of St Peter, Woodkirk (now West Ardsley). Together they had three children: William Hammond Lumb, born 1 May 1812, his middle name preserving his mother’s maiden name; Grace, baptized 12 January 1817 at the Parish Church of St Peter, Woodkirk; and Noah, born 1822. William died in Sheffield in 1818 at age six. Noah died there in 1826 at age four. Grace survived, married Robert Frisby at the Parish Church of St Peter and St Paul, Sheffield (now Sheffield Cathedral) on 20 December 1836, and raised seven children in Sheffield through at least 1881. The Frisby descendants share a half-blood line with Mary Ann Bailey Sharp’s descendants through their common mother Elizabeth Hammond, and any researcher who finds their way to the Frisby or Lumb families in Sheffield will find this the connecting thread. Enoch Lumb was buried in Sheffield on 1 January 1835. Elizabeth Hammond survived him as well, living in Sheffield until she was buried at St George’s Church, Sheffield, on 5 September 1849, aged 73. She had outlived two husbands and three of her five Goodlad children. She did not live to see her granddaughter Mary Ann Bailey leave England for America two years later.
Sarah Goodlad grew up in the household of a widowed and then remarried mother in Sheffield. When she and James Bailey married in 1826 at the Parish Church of St Peter and St Paul, Sheffield, both were described as parishioners of that church, the same building where her younger siblings had been baptized, where her half-sister Grace would marry a decade later. It was the church of the Goodlad family’s Sheffield years, and Sarah married there in the presence of whatever witnesses attended that December day.
After the marriage the Baileys settled in Mattersey, a small village in the Bassetlaw district of Nottinghamshire, roughly thirty miles from Sheffield. James worked as a blacksmith. Their children were baptized at the parish church in Mattersey, their names recorded in the bishop’s transcripts now held at Nottinghamshire Archives:
Mary Ann, born 28 November 1828, baptized 8 December 1828 at Mattersey parish church. She is the thread that connects this family to Sagacity. You can read more about her at the Sharp-Bailey Wedding post.
George, baptized 20 February 1831 at Mattersey parish church, buried 21 October 1834, aged three.
John, baptized 10 February 1833 at Mattersey parish church. He disappears from the record after the christening, absent from the 1841 census, no death recorded, his fate unknown.
George James, baptized 10 December 1834 at Mattersey parish church, seven weeks after his brother George died, buried 14 January 1835, aged five weeks.
Sarah Elizabeth, baptized 11 December 1835 at Mattersey parish church, born less than a year after George James was buried. She appears in the 1841 census at Mattersey, aged five, and then vanishes from the record like her brother John.
Jane, born 19 April 1839, baptized at Mattersey parish church. She also appears in the 1841 census, aged two, and was buried 1 November 1841.
Emma Jane, baptized 27 January 1843 at Mattersey parish church.
The 1841 census found the Bailey household at Mattersey: James, age 40; Sarah, age 40; Mary Ann, age 12; Sarah Elizabeth, age 5; Jane, age 2. Two teenage boys, Joseph Baker and George Swinden, both 15, rounded out the household, almost certainly apprentices to James’s smithy. Three children had died by then. Two more, John and Sarah Elizabeth, slipped from the record without explanation.
Sarah Goodlad Bailey died on 7 September 1843 at Mattersey, aged 43. The death was registered in the sub-district of Gringley, East Retford, entry No. 413. The cause given on the certificate was “Visitation of God,” the Victorian designation for sudden or unexplained death. The informant was P R Falkner, Coroner for the County of Nottingham, not James Bailey, which suggests Sarah’s death was sudden enough, or sufficiently uncertain in its cause, to require a coroner’s involvement. Emma Jane had been baptized on 27 January 1843; Sarah died seven and a half months later. The record does not say whether the two events were connected.
James remarried, to a woman named Harriet, born about 1804 in Green, Yorkshire, whose surname does not appear in any document found so far. By the 1851 census the household at Mattersey consisted of James, age 53, Blacksmith, born Askham, Nottinghamshire; Harriet, age 47, wife, born Yorkshire Green; Emma Jane, age 8, scholar, born Mattersey; and Thomas Parkinson, age 16, apprentice blacksmith, born Clayworth, Nottinghamshire. James had kept a young male apprentice in the house across every census, Joseph Baker and George Swinden in 1841, Thomas Parkinson in 1851, Charles Watkin in 1861. The smithy continued.
Harriet died between 1851 and 1861. The 1861 census found James, now 63 and widowed, still at Mattersey, still listed as a blacksmith. Emma Jane, 18, kept house for him. Charles Watkin, 18, served as apprentice. It was the same household pattern, grown smaller.
After 1861 James Bailey disappears from the record. No death certificate has been found. Mary Ann’s Utah death certificate, completed in Plain City in 1913, identifies her father only as “Bailey.” Her children in Plain City knew their grandfather’s trade and his surname but apparently not his given name.
Mary Ann Bailey left Mattersey as a young woman and eventually left England altogether. Her story after Mattersey is told on this site at the Sharp-Bailey Wedding, the Sharp Family History Outreach, and the Sharp-Stoker Wedding.
Sources
England, Nottinghamshire, Church Records, 1578–1937 (Bishop’s Transcripts, Nottinghamshire Archives) — baptisms of James Bailey (5 February 1797, Askham), George Bailey (20 February 1831, Mattersey), John Bailey (10 February 1833, Mattersey), George James Bailey (10 December 1834, Mattersey), Sarah Elizabeth Bailey (11 December 1835, Mattersey), Emma Jane Bailey (27 January 1843, Mattersey)
England, Yorkshire, Parish Registers, 1538–2016 (Sheffield Archives & Local Studies) — marriage of James Bailey and Sarah Goodlad, 11 December 1826, Parish Church of St Peter and St Paul Sheffield, PR-138-3-22, page 290; baptisms of Mary Ann Goodlad (22 July 1803), Elizabeth Goodlad (21 November 1806), John Goodlad (2 July 1809), all at Parish Church of St Peter and St Paul, Sheffield; marriage of John Goodlad and Elizabeth Hammond, 29 July 1798, Parish Church of St Mary, Rotherham
England, Yorkshire, Bishop’s Transcripts, 1547–1957 (Borthwick Institute for Archives) — baptism of Sarah Goodlad, 30 November 1800, Parish Church of St Mary, Rotherham; baptism of John Goodlad, 28 February 1775, Parish Church of St Peter, Conisbrough; burial of John Goodlad, 26 September 1809, St Peter’s Church, Conisbrough, aged 35; burial of Elizabeth Goodlad, 31 December 1809, St Peter’s Church, Conisbrough; burial of John Goodlad junior, 28 January 1810, St Peter’s Church, Conisbrough
England, Yorkshire, Parish Registers, 1538–2016 (Doncaster Archives) — baptism of John Goodlad, 28 February 1775, Parish Church of St Peter, Conisbrough, page 8, reference P7
General Register Office, London — death certificate of Sarah Bailey, 7 September 1843, Gringley sub-district, East Retford, No. 413, DA 651580; birth certificate of Jane Bailey, 19 April 1839, Gringley sub-district, East Retford, No. 5, BC 917598
England and Wales, Census, 1841 (HO107/851/6) — James Bailey household, Mattersey
England and Wales, Census, 1851 (HO107/2121/86) — James Bailey household, Mattersey; Elizabeth Lumb household, Arundel Street, Sheffield
England and Wales, Census, 1861 (RG09/2412/62) — James Bailey household, Mattersey; Grace Frisby household, Sheffield
England and Wales, Death Registration Index 1837–2007 (FamilySearch) — death of Elizabeth Lumb, 1849, Sheffield, volume 22, page 686
Burials at St George’s Church, Sheffield, September 1849 (Sheffield Archives) — burial of Elizabeth Lumb, 5 September 1849, No. 3630, aged 73
Utah Death Certificate — Mary Ann Sharp, 30 October 1913, Plain City, Weber County, Utah, No. 390
