Unanswered Questions

[Dave Pattern]

I’ve been researching the 1852 Flood on and off for over 5 years and, despite my best efforts, there are still a number of things that remain a mystery — it’d be great to be able to solve them! I’ll create a numbered list that I’ll keep adding to…

1) The available evidence points to Samuel Greenwood‘s birth surname being “Midgley”. His marriage and burial records use “Midgley” whilst the census returns and newspaper reports of the flood use “Greenwood”.

• Why did he adopt the surname Greenwood? There are criminal convictions for “Sam(uel) Midgley”s — can we link them to him?
• Was he actually born at Heptonstall (1851 Census) and when/where was he baptised? The village of Midgley isn’t too far away from Heptonstall so it’s feasible he came from there.

2) Was the body of Joseph Marsden (aged 18) ever found? It was still regarded as missing in the summer of 1852. Also, it’s not 100% clear yet who the mother of Joseph and Joshua was, although it seems likely it was Eliza Marsden.

• I’m not convinced by this, but one vague possibility is that Joseph and his younger brother Joshua (aged 16) were similar enough to be mistaken for each other, the body of Joseph was misidentified as Joshua, and Joshua’s body was the one found “in the shop of Mr. Wood, grocer and draper, Town Gate” and subsequently buried as “unknown boy” at St. John’s, Upperthong. The evidence against that is that a) the body of Joshua was identified by his cousin Frederic, b) the age of the unknown boy was estimated as 11, and c) the Marsden brothers were apparently well known in the area (Joseph was a Sunday School teacher at Holmfirth Wesleyan Chapel). I guess the flip side is that we need to account for who the “unknown boy” actually was since he can’t be matched to any of the known victims.

3) Where was Ellen Wood buried? It seems her mother didn’t take the body back to Shepley for burial. Did Jonathan Sandford’s father pay for Ellen to be buried with the Sandfords at Holmfirth Wesleyan Chapel?

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