Taylor Family of Great Harwood
by Barbara Youds – 20 August 2026
Years ago I, and others, made a very basic error on the Taylor family tree that has since been repeated many times on Ancestry, Family Search, Geneanet, and no doubt other places. It is time to set the record straight.
Richard Taylor, son of Jeffery Taylor and Grace Walmsley, and his wife, Ann Mercer, had a son they named after his grandfather, Jeffery, whose baptism is recorded at St Bartholomew’s on 20th January 1760. There are no other baptisms recorded around that time to fit with the Jeffery Taylor who later married Ann Heys, therefore many people, including myself, assumed it was that same Jeffery.
All these years later I know not to assume anything, and to check deaths and do a thorough search to make sure you have the right person, but way back in the early 1970s, working from transcribed registers and original records in libraries and the record office, I did not, and today people are just copying the same assumptions that others have jumped to over the years.
There was a small Eureka! moment in the archives as I realised the relevance of the words in front of me.
I give unto Martha Taylor Daughter of John Taylor Deceased five pounds I give unto Pegey Taylor Daughter of John Taylor five pounds, I give unto Rachel Taylor Daughter of John Taylor five pounds, then I give Jeffery Taylor Son of John Taylor aforesaid the Sum of Thirteen pounds and the Interest arising from the said sum since the Twentyth day of January one Thousand Seven Hundred and Twenty two which laid down the said sum upon Mortgage of the Estate of the aforesaid John Taylor in Rishton in the County of Lancaster aforesaid holden by Lease
Baptisms for the two first-named children, Martha and Peggy, are in the Great Harwood registers (Table A4). No baptism has yet been found for Rachel, or for Jeffery, but it is clear this is the Jeffery who married Ann Heys, daughter of John Heys of Belmont Farm and who died there in 1831 with his age given as 66, making his birth year around 1765. Everything fell into place when I realised he had been brought up by his maternal grandparents, William and Martha Mercer of Lower Fold. Of his nine children his first son was named William, and his second daughter Martha after his grandparents. Martha seems to have been much loved and several descendants were named for her.
Having spent the best part of thirty years looking for Jeffery Taylor I found him in a document I was reading for an entirely different reason: a will in another family’s papers, consulted for a different project. Looking at the wider community can often reap unexpected rewards.
A Common Name in a Small Town
If you were to gather a group of Great Harwood folk together and look into their ancestry you would very soon find that many of them would share ancestors going back many generations. Surnames that would be most likely crop up would be Mercer, Hindle, Duckworth, Calvert, Baron, Birtwistle and Taylor.
These are the most common names locally, but Taylor has the disadvantage of being very common nationally and it can be difficult to trace a family with certainty. For our Great Harwood Taylors we can trace them back with confidence to a family settled in Rishton in the late 1600s, but it has proved difficult to trace them back before this not simply because of the frequency of the name but because parish register survival and accuracy can be patchy in the 17th century.
Great Harwood at this time was a divided manor: originally a single lordship, later split into two unequal portions held by the Heskeths and the Nowells, with everyone either leasing their property directly from the landowners or subletting from the lessees. The town, in common with many neighbouring towns and villages in the area and Lancashire as a whole, was changing in nature from a largely agricultural economy to one where most people gained their income from a mixture of farming and other trades, notably textiles; firstly, wool and later cotton.
Thomas Taylor of Rishton
Thomas Taylor lived in Rishton in the later 17th and early 18th centuries. There is a marriage to a Mary Monk, but there is no other evidence to link this marriage to Thomas, nor are there burials for Thomas or his wife. What we do have are some parish register entries for the children of Thomas (Table A1).
The spacing between the children is suspicious: 14 years between the first two children listed, then another four until the next child. Unless Thomas and his wife experienced a lot of miscarriages and infant deaths before they could be baptised it is likely other children were born but either not baptised or the baptism wasn’t recorded. This is what we know though, and it is the birth of Jefferay in 1691 that is significant for those with Great Harwood Taylors.
Jeffery Taylor and Grace Walmsley
There is a possibility that Thomas Taylor, father of Jefferay (Jeffray, Jeffery, Geoffrey – so many ways to spell this name!) was a tailor; there is a burial for a Thomas Taylor, tailor in Blackburn in 1739. Jeffery’s chosen bride was Grace Walmsley, daughter of William Walmsley, tailor of Great Harwood and Elizabeth Cunliffe his wife. Families had a tendency to marry within trades, although Jeffery himself was, in late years at least, a husbandman, which was a term for a tenant farmer, although he styled himself yeoman in his will, but in some parish register entries for the baptism of his children he is named as a tailor.
The Walmsleys had come to Great Harwood in the middle years of the previous century, from nearby Ramsgreave and Mellor areas, and William was most probably the oldest son of Lawrence Walmsley of Cock Bridge who had married Elizabeth Cunliffe, a daughter of John Cunliffe and Isabel his wife, and a Roman Catholic. Grace, wife of Jeffery, remained a Catholic during her life and is listed as a recusant in the Return of Papists in 1767, along with the family of her daughter Grace Roscow. Grace Roscow isn’t listed on the register and may have died between 1765, when she was mentioned in her father’s will, and 1767 when the register of recusants was compiled.
The Walmsleys have a story of their own, which will soon be added to the site. In the Taylor story, however, Grace’s brother Richard Walmsley of Tan House has an important part to play.
Too many Jefferys!
I have only found one marriage for a Jeffery Taylor around this time in this area, that of Jeffery and Grace Walmsley. However, there are a confusing number of baptisms listed after their marriage year for children of a Jeffery Taylor with an assortment of wives, locations and occupations. All the register entries in Table A2 have been taken from the original images, accessed via Ancestry and there is no doubt about what was written.
Fortunately, Jeffery named his children in his will and his bequests to them:
| Bequest | To |
| Tenement in Rishton | Son John Taylor |
| 1 shilling | Son Thomas |
| 6s 8d a year | Son Richard Taylor |
| 6s 8d a year | Daughter Elizabeth, wife of William Shuttleworth |
| 6s 8d | Daughter Grace, wife of William Roscow |
The shilling given to Thomas suggests that he’d had his child’s portion before his father died. Comparing the two lists of children with known ages at death we can say with a high degree of confidence that Thomas born 1718, Richard born 1731 and Grace born 1735 are the people mentioned in the will. Elizabeth Shuttleworth, wife of William was said to be eighty when she died in 1809, which suggests the Elizabeth baptised in 1727, as does the place and occupation – but not the mother being named as Ann in the register. Clerical error? It is highly likely that most of these children are those of Jeffery and Grace, the gap between 1718 and 1731 is a long time without children and it could be that Jeffery and Grace were resident in Rishton, but being in the part of Rishton that was under Blackburn parish were listed as being ‘of Blackburn’ in the registers.
Of the nine children that can with confidence be said to be the children of Jeffery and Grace only five are mentioned in Jeffery’s will of 1765. The burials of Ann and James are recorded in the registers, but William and Mary’s burials have yet to be found.
Tan House
Grace Taylor’s only surviving brother was Richard Walmsley of Tan House, Great Harwood. Information from estate plans and land records prove this to be the house that faces on to Tan House Lane, rather than the house behind that to the south. No lease exists showing how or when Richard obtained the tenancy, but his father was listed on the lease of the property to William Mercer in 1670. Richard did marry, but had no surviving children and when he died he left the tenancy of Tan House to his nephew Thomas Taylor.
Thomas Taylor of Tan House may have been the person to claim the tenancy because his family had probably had a connection to it for many years. William Mercer, ‘of Tan House’, was granted the lease in 1670, although the way it is worded makes it clear that it may have been a renewal of a lease. The terms were for three lives, and most often in these agreements the lives are those of family or people with a close connection, and usually the younger members of the family in the hope of the lease lasting for many years. William, son of Lawrence Walmsley was named as a life on the lease. I suspect, although it can’t be proved, that Lawrence’s mother may have been a Mercer, and indeed there were several Grace Mercers baptised in the right time frame and one of those was a child of a William Mercer.
We know this lease refers to the same tenement that Thomas Taylor inherited because the acreage matches that of this holding rather than the slightly smaller Tan House nearby, and the fields can be cross referenced with a later map of the estate. A survey of Hesketh lands in 1735 shows that by now Richard Walmsley, son of William and uncle of Thomas Taylor was in possession of the tenement. At that time his sister Grace was also listed as a life on the lease. It isn’t clear when the Walmsley family first lived at Tan House, three of William’s children were born in the Green Cliff area, which included Tan House, but when William died in 1701 he was said to be from Wigans, which just refers to a place named after someone who lived there, either currently or in the past. When Richard Walmsley was buried in 1759 however, he was said to be from Tanhouse, so was in possession rather than just a name on the lease – and he left the tenancy to his sister Grace’s son, Thomas Taylor.
The five children of Jeffery Taylor and Grace Walmsley
Elizabeth and Grace
Elizabeth married William Shuttleworth, and Grace married William Roscow
Thomas of Tan House
Thomas, being the son of Jeffery Taylor of Rishton, had not until now lived in the town but at some point he moved his family to live at Tan House. This family consisted of the children of Thomas by his first wife Grace Ainsworth, who died in 1759 and their step mother, Ann. Thomas wrote his will in 1804 although he didn’t die until four years later, and in it he named his surviving children:
- Thomas
- Peggy (Margaret) – wife of James Fielden of Cock in Great Harwood
- Sarah – widow of John Osbaldeston of Blackburn
- Grace – wife of Thomas Hindle
- James
Thomas and James, his sons, were executors of the will as was Alexander Mercer of the adjacent Tan House.
This will makes quite clear exactly who the Grace Taylor was who married Thomas Hindle in 1779 in Great Harwood. The vast majority of online trees have confused her with the daughter of Richard Taylor who married Alice Mercer. Grace Taylor, daughter of ThomasTaylor, was born and baptised in Blackburn and married Thomas Hindle; her cousin Grace Taylor, daughter of Richard, was born and baptised in Great Harwood, married James Hindle, and they lived at Riley Hey and were both at nearby Shirtley when they died. Thomas Hindle and Grace lived at Tan House and had a large family there.
John of Rishton
Jeffery left his tenement in Rishton to his son John. This was also leasehold, under Lady Catherine Stourton. John died in 1779, in Blackburn, but was buried at Great Harwood church. He had married Elizabeth Mercer, of the Lowerfold Mercers and who had been born in Yorkshire. Elizabeth predeceased her husband in 1772 and the care of the children then passed to their maternal grandparents William and Martha Mercer at Lowerfold.
These are the children named in William Mercer’s will — and one of them is the Jeffery I spent nearly thirty years looking for.
Richard of Riley Hey
Richard Taylor can be traced after his birth only through parish registers. Between 1758 and 1778 he and his wife baptised nine children at St Bartholomew’s, the family appearing at Lower Fold and then at Riley Hey, and Richard described in turn as plodweaver, blacksmith, farmer and husbandman (Table A3).
Grace, his mother, was living with Richard on her death in 1779.
Richard became a farmer at Riley Hey, but sometime after the birth of his son Richard in 1778 and his own death in 1801 the family had moved to Tottleworth.
One of Richard’s sons was baptised Jeffery, after his grandfather, on 20th January 1760 — the man with whom this article began.
The two Jefferys
Richard’s son Jeffery, baptised in 1760, lived out his life quite separately and was buried at Great Harwood on 24th March 1828, his age given as 68 and his abode Lowertown. That is exactly right for a birth in 1760. The Jeffery who married Ann Heys and died at Belmont in 1831, aged 66, was John’s son, brought up at Lower Fold by his Mercer grandparents. Two men with the same name, and an assumption made in the early 1970s both by myself and at least one other that has since been copied into a great many trees.
Belmont and Edge End
Two Ordnance Survey maps, 1840s and 1890s showing Edge End. On the later map the houses on the north of the row are those mostly occupied by the Taylor clan.
It was the descendants of Jeffery Taylor and Ann Heys who became a prolific family in the nineteenth century. Not only was Jeffery the grandchild of William Mercer of Lower Fold, but his wife was the daughter of John Heys of Belmont Farm; both families were yeoman stock and the family were in a good position to overcome the hardships of the end of the handloom weaving era that brought such tribulations to others in the town. From Belmont the family spread to Higher Edge End Farm, the cottages, and beyond, and David Taylor, child of Jeffery and Ann, founded the line who became prominent mill owners in Blackburn.
Higher Edge End farm, occupied by Jeffery Taylor who died in 1868.
Jeffery, another child of Jeffery and Ann, brother of David, became a farmer at Higher Edge End and also the owner of some of the cottages at Edge End, otherwise known as Clinkham. During the middle of the nineteenth century his family inhabited several of the cottages and were now becoming hand loom weavers, and later power loom weavers. My own great grandmother, Mary Taylor, great granddaughter of Jeffery and Ann, was born at Higher Edge End Farm.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this branch of the family though is their connection with the hospitality business – Jeffery Taylor who died in 1868 had opened a beershop in the cottages at Edge End, possibly to take advantage of the traffic to and from the quarries that had opened to provide materials to build the ever growing town.
This article is based on my own research into parish registers, wills, estate material and related family records. Where conclusions remain uncertain, I have tried to say so plainly rather than make the evidence do more than it can.
More to be found!
Family history is never complete and there are still questions to be answered about this family:
- The parents and wife of Thomas Taylor of Rishton and anything before him.
- The baptisms for Rachel and Jeffery, children of John Taylor of Rishton and Elizabeth Mercer.
- The burials of William and Mary, children of Jeffery and Grace.
- Whether William Walmsley’s mother, wife of Lawrence Walmsley, was a Mercer.
The story of the family of David Taylor, son of Jeffery and Ann Heys, is documented to some extent in the second book by William Birtwistle – ‘Birtwistle: A Family of East Lancashire Cotton Manufacturers’.
If anyone reading this can fill in these gaps please get in touch.
Table A1 — Children of Thomas Taylor of Rishton
| Date | Entry | Church | Abode | Register / source |
| 28 Jun 1691 | Baptism — Jefferay Taylor, Son of Thomas Taylor | St Mary the Virgin, Blackburn | Rushton | Baptisms 1680–1722 LDS Film 1278778 |
| 11 Apr 1705 | Baptism — James Taylor, son of Thomas Taylor | St Bartholomew, Great Harwood | Rishton | Baptisms 1684–1744, p.18, e.39 LDS Film 1278890 |
| 11 Dec 1709 | Baptism — Mary Taylor, D of Thomas Taylor | St Bartholomew, Great Harwood | Rushton | Baptisms 1684–1744, p.22, e.18 LDS Film 1278890 |
| 15 Dec 1709 | Burial — Mary Taylor, an infant, daughter of Thomas Taylor | St Bartholomew, Great Harwood | Rushton | Burials 1684–1744, p.66, e.12 LDS Film 1278890 |
Table A2 — Entries naming a Jeffery Taylor, 1718–1743
| Date | Register wording | Church | Verdict |
| 21 Dec 1718 | Thomas Taylor son of Jefferey Taylor from Rishton | Great Harwood | Jeffery & Grace — named in the will |
| 18 Dec 1720 | Ann daughter of Jeffery Tayler of Banks within Harwood | Whalley | See burial below |
| 13 Jul 1721 | Burial: Ann Tayler daughter of Jefferey Tayler from Rishton | Great Harwood | Could this be the Ann listed above? |
| 16 Sep 1722 | William Tayler son of Jeffery Tayler from Rishton | Great Harwood | Probably correct but no burial for William found. |
| 7 Apr 1724 | Burial: Margaret Taylor Daughter of Jeofrey Taylor of Billington Husbandman | Blackburn | Unresolved |
| 22 Aug 1725 | John Taylor of Jeofry Taylor & Martha, Blackburn, Taylor | Blackburn | No marriage to a Martha found. Any mention of Blackburn as abode may relate to the parish, to which part of Rishton belonged. |
| 15 Oct 1727 | John Taylor Son of Jeffrey Taylor, Billington, Labourer | Whalley | Fits with the birth of son John, but the place is incorrect unless it was on the border of the two townships, such as Snodworth; see final list item. |
| 31 Dec 1727 | Elizabeth Taylor of Jeofry Taylor & Ann, Blackburn, Taylor | Blackburn | Probably Jeffery & Grace — mother’s name a clerical error? |
| 28 Mar 1731 | Richard Taylor, Son of Jeofry Taylor & Grace, Blackburn, Taylor | Blackburn | Jeffery & Grace — named in the will |
| 12 Aug 1733 | Mary Taylor of Jeoffrey Taylor & Grace, Blackburn | Blackburn | Would seem to be correct, but no mention of Mary found. |
| 5 Oct 1735 | Grace Taylor of Jeoffrey Taylor & Grace, Blackburn | Blackburn | Jeffery & Grace — named in the will |
| 10 Oct 1739 | James Taylor, Son of Jeffrey Taylor of Blackburn | Blackburn | See below. |
| 12 Jun 1743 | James Taylor son of Jeffery Taylor from Snodworth in Billington, Plodweaver | Great Harwood | Unresolved. |
Table A3 — Children of Richard Taylor
| Date | Entry | Abode | Occupation | Register / source |
| 12 Mar 1758 | Baptism — Grace Taylor, daughter of Richard Taylor | Lower fold | Plodweaver | Baptisms 1744–1767, p.45, e.9 LDS Film 1278890 |
| 20 Jan 1760 | Baptism — Jeffrey Taylor, son of Richard Taylor | Rial Hey | Blacksmith [not in register] | Baptisms 1744–1767, p.51, e.10 LDS Film 1278890 |
| 10 Mar 1764 | Baptism — Thomas Taylor, son of Richard Taylor | Rial Hey | Plodweaver | Baptisms 1744–1767, p.66, e.13 LDS Film 1278890 |
| 2 Aug 1766 | Baptism — James Taylor, son of Richard Taylor | Ryal Hey | — | Baptisms 1744–1767, p.74, e.15 LDS Film 1278890 |
| 16 Feb 1768 | Baptism — William Taylor, son of Richard Taylor | Rial Hey | Plodweaver | Baptisms 1767–1803, p.5, e.10 LDS Film 1278890 |
| 18 Feb 1771 | Burial — Thomas Taylor, son of Richard Taylor | Riley Hey | — | Burials 1767–1803, p.128, e.13 LDS Film 1278890 |
| 20 Jun 1772 | Baptism — Alice Taylor, daughter of Richard Taylor | Rial Hey | — | Baptisms 1767–1803, p.20, e.4 LDS Film 1278890 |
| 27 Aug 1774 | Baptism — Mary Taylor, Daughter of Richard Taylor | Royal Hey | Farmer | Baptisms 1767–1803, p.30, e.9 LDS Film 1278890 |
| 20 Jul 1776 | Baptism — Joyce Taylor, Daughter of Richard Taylor | Royal Hey | — | Baptisms 1767–1803, p.42, e.8 LDS Film 1278890 |
| 22 Aug 1778 | Baptism — Richd. Taylor, Son of Richd. Taylor | Royal Hey | Husbandman | Baptisms 1767–1803, p.56, e.17 LDS Film 1278890 |
All at St Bartholomew, Great Harwood.
Table A4 — Related entries
| Date | Entry | Abode | Register / source |
| 28 Jan 1759 | Baptism — Martha Taylor, daughter of John Taylor | Rishton | — |
| 28 Dec 1760 | Baptism — Margret Taylor, daughter of John Taylor, Plodweaver | Rishton | — |
| 23 Mar 1779 | Burial — Grace Taylor, Widow | Royal Hey | Burials 1767–1803, p.148, e.1 LDS Film 1278890 |
| 24 Mar 1828 | Burial — Jeffrey Taylor, age 68 | Lowertown | Burials 1813–1832, p.139, e.1112 Parish Registers |
All at St Bartholomew, Great Harwood.