Barnabas Fenton was a farm worker for most of his life, travelling around Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire before settling in Gainsborough. Here he found a different type of work as a boiler firer and finally, at the age of 72, a road labourer! You had to be tough to survive in the Nineteenth Century.
Barnabas was the youngest of his family and in the 1851 Census he and his widowed father are the only people left at their home in Bole. By 1861 he’s newly married and living with his wife’s father, also a widower, in nearby Sturton. With them is three-year-old William Bell, the grandson of Jane’s father and identified in the next census as Barnabas and Jane’s son.
Father of Mary Ann and son of John and Sarah Fenton
Baptised Barnabas Fenton on 18 May 1828 in Bole, Nottinghamshire
Married Jane Bell in early 1861
Died 1905 in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire