Mary Ann Whittaker

The Grave That Reached for Me

Mary Ann Whittaker whispered quietly to me. She was pleading, and desperately sad. I walked by her stone twice, just to make sure it was her reaching out, and both times I had the same feeling.

Initially I didn’t understand why she was pleading—I thought perhaps it had something to do with her son, who shared her grave marker and had died 18 months before her. He’s what I initially reached for as I started looking into her life; but what I found was so much deeper.

The Lowe Family

She was born on July 6, 1832, according to the date later carved on her gravestone, and baptized two days later on July 8. Mary Ann was the third of four children and only daughter of James Lowe and Ann Needham. As someone who has three brothers and no sisters, I felt an instant kinship when I learned this fact. I see you, Mary Ann.

She and her brothers were born in Oldham, Lancashire, England, a town known for cotton spinning and hat making. In the 1830s it was as full of working-class people as it was of mill chimneys and coal hearths.

The Lowe family lived on Maygate Lane, where her father worked as a hatter—possibly in a workshop above their living quarters. The smell of mercury-treated fur felt would have filled their home, a harbinger of future misfortune.

Mary Ann had already lost her oldest brother, Thomas, in 1844 when he was 19 and she was just twelve. But then her father started showing the tremors.

There’s a reason Lewis Carroll’s Hatter was mad in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Hatters were exposed to mercury throughout their careers, and it caused a host of neurological and psychiatric symptoms, in addition to hand tremors, loss of coordination, blackened gums, and tooth loss.

The tragedy is that the men in the trade knew it was killing them. But Lancashire working-class life during the Industrial Revolution was a menu of slow deaths. The hat trade was just one of the better-paying ones.

Still, I bet the first time James Lowe saw his hand shake, his stomach clenched with fear at what it meant for him.

Mary Ann’s father died in 1860 at the age of 56, longer than many hatters lived. Mary Ann was 28 years old. As a very young woman she would have watched her father deteriorate in awful ways; and as the only daughter, she almost certainly helped her mother care for him.

Mary Ann's second brother, John, who had followed his father into the hat trade, would join his father and brother in the Lowe family grave in 1861. I can’t help but think about the guilt James must have felt as he was suffering from the effects of his occupation, only to start seeing the same symptoms in his son whom he probably apprenticed himself.

Mary Ann saw the deaths of three of her loved ones before she was 30; and then, nine years later in 1870, she lost her youngest brother, Robert. The lives of the Lowe family men slipped away like quicksilver.

Mary Ann Butterworth

Mary Ann did not appear with her family in the 1851 census. It seems plausible that, like many young working-class women of the time, she may have been living elsewhere as a domestic servant.

I kept looking for a marriage to George Whittaker, the husband named on her gravestone. Instead, I discovered that before she became Mary Ann Whittaker, she had first been Mary Ann Butterworth.

In 1861 she married a young widower called John Butterworth. John worked as a coal miner, yet another trade that was extremely dangerous and came with the shortened life span she had already experienced with the men in her family.

I was surprised to discover that the son named on their gravestone as James Whittaker had actually been baptized James Lowe Butterworth in 1864. George Whittaker was not his birth father.

The marriage was short, and Mary Ann lost more in those years than I realized at first. John Butterworth died in 1870, just months before the passing of Mary Ann’s last living brother. She was widowed with a young son.

When she married George Whittaker in 1873, little James took on the name of his stepfather—the only dad he would really know well.

Leaving England

George Whittaker immigrated to the United States in 1855, but he evidently went back to England for a short time and that’s when he and Mary Ann were married.

I couldn’t find any evidence of when George returned to the United States, but Mary Ann and James, at least, stayed in England for several years. My gut feeling is, she had to stay and care for her mother, the only member of her family still alive.

Ann Lowe died in 1877 at the age of 73—and Mary Ann had no one left who needed her.

With no more family to stay in England for, she joined her new husband in America in 1879. I found the newly reunited family living in Eureka, Nevada, in the 1880 census. George Whittaker was working as a miner, Mary Ann was keeping house, and James was 15 and attending school.

Her life looked stable. After witnessing the deaths of seven loved ones, she had 20 good years where the desert could finally dry up her tears.

Mammoth, Utah

By the late 1880s they were living in Mammoth, Utah, a mining boom town in the East Tintic Mountains in Juab County. The area was remote, and the environment was harsh. They were 6,300 feet above sea level, and there was no water to be found anywhere nearby.

The mines piped in water for industrial use, but residents had to buy drinking water for ten cents a gallon. It would have been quite an adjustment for a woman coming from the green hills of England where it rained 200 days out of the year.

But Mary Ann had worked as a cotton winder as a young widow to support her son and her mother. This was a factory job that required long hours on her feet in harsh conditions.

She was not a shy and retiring Lancashire lass—Mary Ann was a hardy working woman who knew the definition of labor. She would have known how to conduct herself in an American West mining town.

George appears repeatedly in Juab County land records as early as 1887, buying and selling shares in mining claims. James was working as the druggist in the town, a central figure that everyone needed so everyone knew.

They seemed to be making a good life for themselves, as rough as it might have been.

The Child No One Remembered

Unfortunately, Mary Ann had not yet seen the last death of her life. In 1899 her boy James was sickened by a stomach ulcer, and shortly after was hit by the pneumonia that ultimately took his life. He was only 35.

The newspaper notice of his death said of him, “the deceased was more than ordinarily popular with all classes, the young and the old.” He had not married, he had no children, but listed as his survivors in his obituary were “Mr. and Mrs. George Whittaker, most estimable people… who were inconsolable over their loss.”

As I tracked Mary Ann in all the records I could find for her, I located her and George in the 1900 census a year after James died. They were still in Mammoth, just the two of them in a little house they owned.

The 1900 census is a unique census record because it’s the only one that asked a woman to report how many children she has had, and how many were living. For Mary Ann, she answered two children, zero living.

Two children.

Mary Ann had lost more than I had thought. She had another child out there—and I was driven to find them.

She was already 41 when she married George Whittaker, so the chances were lower that her missing child was his. So, back to English records—and after a few very late nights, I finally found Mary Ann’s missing baby: Ann Ellen Butterworth, born in early March of 1862, named after both her grandmothers.

I was so invested in this story at this point that I cried when I found her.

And then I cried again when I found her death.

It wasn’t easy to find. She wasn’t named in the church burials. The Lowe family had a plot in the Chadderton cemetery in Oldham, with a large stone that listed the names of Mary Ann’s parents and all her brothers.

A city record of Oldham burials is the only place I found her name. It indicated Ann Ellen was buried in the Lowe family plot, but her name did not appear on the gravestone inscription.

James had at least been remembered in stone. Ann Ellen had not. Without the 1900 census, I would never have known to look for her at all.

I was struck by the realization that Ann Ellen’s name had been essentially lost to history. With no inscription on the gravestone and no entry in the church burial book, she had nearly vanished from public memory.

But not from Mary Ann’s.

What I Could Give Back

By the summer of 1901 Mary Ann and George had relocated to Salt Lake City. They were living in a house across the street from the original West High School building, and had a grand view of the Salt Lake Temple out their back door.

In August she became sick with dysentery. It was rampant at the turn of the century, especially in the hot summer months. Perhaps her body was already weakened by grief after losing her son, but after 2 weeks of fighting it the sickness took her on August 12, 1901. She was 69 years old.

She was buried in the Mt. Olivet Cemetery, and I discovered that James’ body was moved from the Eureka City Cemetery four months later, to rest with hers.

George Whittaker was not buried at Mt. Olivet with his wife and the son he raised. I continued to find him in mining land records until about 1908, after which he vanished from any records.

I like to think he must have visited his wife’s grave while he still lived, but when he vanished, so did all living memory of Mary Ann Lowe Butterworth Whittaker.

Mary Ann had pleaded with me when I found her grave, so sad and so desperate—and I thought her grief must have been about her son.

But in the end, I believe it was also about her daughter. I can put words to her plea now: “Don’t let them be forgotten, the way I have been.”

I found your baby, Mary Ann. And now your story is documented with both of your kids. This rock is for all of you.

Rest easy, my friend. You are no longer overlooked.

Records That Returned Mary Ann