Miles Lister was the eldest of Abraham and Margaret Lister’s five children. He was born in Holbeck, near Leeds in the West Riding of Yorkshire. We don’t know what his early life was like but we do know his father left a will, so there must have been a reasonable income. Miles was twelve when his father died and would have had to assume a lot of responsibility for his mother, two sisters and two brothers.
Five years later his mother married again and three years after that, Miles and Hannah Brotherhead were married. Miles gave his occupation as “clothier”, which probably meant making cloth rather than clothes. He was able to sign his name, unlike his sister Eleanor (who was a witness to the marriage) or Hannah herself.
Miles and Hannah had four children. Abraham was born in 1777 and Eleanor in 1778. Both were baptised at St Peter’s, the parish church in Leeds. However the family left the Church of England and joined the non-conformist Whitehall Chapel, where our ancestor Sarah was baptised in 1780. By the time her sister Alice was born in 1785, they had transferred their allegiance to the Ebenezer Chapel. These chapels maintained friendly relations. When William Price, the minister at Ebenezer, died in 1794, Edward Parsons, the minister from Whitehall (then Salem) preached the eulogy.
Death was a familiar part of life in the eighteenth century. Abraham had died in 1783 at the age of five. Miles and Hannah faced another tragedy in 1792 when their daughter Alice died in March, aged seven. Hannah’s uncle Christopher and her father both died that summer.
Miles Lister himself died in 1808 and was buried at Holbeck. He was described as “ a married man”, so either his wife Hannah survived him or she had died in the intervening years and he had married again. There is evidence for either of these outcomes: a research opportunity beckons!
Father of Sarah Lister and son of Abraham and Margaret Lister
Baptised on 23 May 1756 at Holbeck (Leeds), Yorkshire
Married Hannah Brotherhead on 4 July 1776
Buried 6 April 1808