#52Ancestors #41: Thomas Halliday 3rd, seller of soap

Thomas Halliday 3rd

Thomas Halliday, my Great-Great-Grandfather, was born in November 1835 and baptised on Christmas Eve 1835 in the Methodist New Connexion Chapel in Gateshead. He was the oldest child of Thomas and Jane Halliday and his parents had had another 6 children by the time he was 12: Hannah, Mary (who I believe died young), Mary Jane, David Ingram, Elizabeth and Sarah Jane.

Thomas was still in Gateshead in 1851 when he was 15, and working as a draper.  However, by the time of the 1861 census when he was 25, he was living in Leeds, West Yorkshire where he married Mary Anne Howe.

Together they went on to have six children, Martha E in Shipley, Mary Hannah ‘Susie’ in Gateshead, Thomas and Jane Anne in Leeds, Elizabeth Helena ‘Lena’ in Gateshead and their youngest, my great-grandmother, Sarah Emmaline ‘Sallie’, in Burley. Thomas during those years worked variously as an assistant soap agent & traveller (like/with his father), a clerk in an iron works and as a grocer’s commission agent.  Their daughters worked as weavers and tailoresses, Thomas 4th became a clerk in a telegraph office.

Mary H ‘Susie’ Halliday

In 1891 when he was an executor for his mother Jane Halliday’s will, he was specifically bequeathed her green drawing-room suite, her cabinet and her small needlework sewn frame, with Mary Anne being bequeathed her gold watch key.  Up until that point Thomas and Mary Anne had been in possession of Jane’s piano but Jane bequeathed that to Thomas’ younger sister Sarah Anne.

By 1901 Thomas had retired as a butter salesman.  He and Mary Anne were living in Bayswater Row, Leeds.

Thomas died 3 years later of a stroke in Berwick in Elmet aged 68.  Unusually for a member of the Halliday family, he didn’t leave a will.

© Text and photos copyright Lynne Black 7 October 2014

First published:

https://starryblackness.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/thomas-halliday3/