Elizabeth Spooner is the first (working backwards) of our ancestors to come from Sheffield, bringing a new element into our family story. Her father was part of the cutlery industry which made Sheffield famous.
Both of her parents were widowed when they married: I have not been able to find any children of her mother’s previous marriage but her father had at least four boys. The oldest was only thirteen when his father re-married so Elizabeth would grow up with five older brothers. She was the second of the four children her parents had together, and the first of her father’s two daughters.
On her marriage she left the city and settled in her husband’s home of Dronfield, where they stayed for about six years before moving to Unstone. These are villages within a few miles of each other in the borough of Chesterfield. Elizabeth brought up her eight children in a much more rural environment than the one she grew up in herself.
However in the late 1850s the family moved into the industrial world of Cavendish Square, where Elizabeth’s husband John died in 1860. In the 1861 census she was in the Square, making a living as a laundress, with her son William and her daughters Esther (our ancestor), Mary and Emma.
I have not been able to find her in the 1871 census but she was living in Whittington when she died in 1880. We know that William had married and moved to Brunswick Street, Whittington so possibly she was with him.
Mother of Esther Ward and daughter of Thomas and Alice Spooner
Born 9 November 1807 and baptised Elizabeth Spooner on 6 December 1807 at the parish church (now the Cathedral) in Sheffield, Yorkshire
Married John Ward Jnr on 16 September 1832
Buried 2 November 1880