Robert Stansfield

Died 30th September 1849

Robert Stansfield died on 30th September 1849 , aged 60. He was born on the 20th December 1788 and baptised a month later on 18th January 1789, in Warkworth. He was the son of Abraham Stansfield and Eleanor Guthrie and had seven brothers and two sisters  all born in Warkworth or Alnwick.

In 1841 he was a labourer, unmarried and living with a younger brother, George aged 40 and George’s wife Mary Alder born in Gateshead. George was a tailor and they had a daughter, also Mary, aged 8. Mary had been born in Alnwick in 1832. She had two sisters also born in Alnwick, Eleanor in 1821 and Ann in 1823. Both had left home before the 1841 census and Eleanor had married another tailor, George Peacock.

So when Robert died of cholera he was still unmarried and was buried in a mass grave behind the church, with no headstone.

By 1851 Eleanor was again living in Pottergate Place with her parents, and two young children, both born in Newcastle. Ten years later she and her husband and six children had moved back to Newcastle.

In 1861 Mary was 29 and unmarried. She went to live with her father, now widowed , as his “housekeeper “. Two of Eleanor‘s children were in Pottergate too, at the time of the census. Mary later married Thomas Welch a coal miner and in 1871, George was retired and went to live with their family, in Ashington for the final year of his life, 23 years after his brother Robert’s death from cholera.