Author: Broughton, John
Biography:
BROUGHTON, John (1800-46: ancestry.co.uk)
Although nineteenth-century and family-history sources state his birthplace as Scotland, there are no extant records to prove it and his parents are therefore not known. The 1841 Census records him as born out of county (Yorkshire). He lived almost his entire life in Grassington, Linton-in-Craven, Yorkshire, and there are several matches in county but there is no corroboration that they might be him so there is insufficient evidence to discount the Scottish and out-of-county birth. Nothing is known of his education and he worked mainly as a stone-mason. He married Mary Birch (1801-77) on 30 June 1823 at Linton-in-Craven. For reasons unknown they married with “the consents in this case required” although they were both of full age. They had seven daughters and two sons: most of the daughters became cotton weavers, the sons stone-masons. He was musical and was known for his bass voice in the Grassington Independent Chapel congregation. He is also recorded as a schoolmaster but this probably involved only elementary and/or Sunday school teaching. His poetry, printed for him at nearby Skipton, was well known locally, but the work listed here is very rare and seems to exist in a single copy at Leeds Central Library. The poems contain borrowings from Burns and Ramsay and by 1827 were not that original. The demotic “On Hearing Sheep Bleat” and the topgraphical “A Walk to the River Wharf” and “A Tour to Blackpool” are perhaps worth another look. He died of consumption on 29 Sept. 1846 at Grassington and was buried in the churchyard of the Independent Chapel. His wife, Mary Broughton, later moved to Manningham, Bradford, where she died in 1877. (ancestry.co.uk 13 Jan. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 13 Jan. 2024; B. J. Harker, Rambles in Upper Wharfdale [1869], 26-7; J. H. Dixon, Chronicles and Stories of the Craven Dales [1881], 20-1; Ross Horsley at secretlibraryleeds.net; GRO death cert.) AA