Of John and Mary Ann’s children, none achieved the prominence of their various Walmsley cousins. The eldest daughter Elizabeth (b 1819) never married: she continued as a milliner and straw-bonnet maker for 15 years or more after her father’s death. By 1861 she had become a teacher of infants in Thingwall, West Derby, and was also looking after the infant son of her younger sister Emma. She may have moved to Thingwall with her married younger sister Sarah Jane, who lived there for several years in the late 1850s, and stayed on for a while after Sarah Jane returned to Liverpool. At some point before 1871 Elizabeth then moved to Buckley in Flintshire, following her younger sister Margaret, and lived there at the Spon Green end with her younger brother William until at least 1881.
The eldest son James (b 1821) was fortunate to receive a comprehensive education before his father died. In 1841, at the age of nearly 20, he was still at school. What became of him thereafter is unknown.
Mary Ann (b 1822) worked a straw-bonnet maker before she married Clement Ekin in 1849. The couple had a son Clement John Hansard (b c1850) but by 1851 Mary Ann was a widow, living with her mother in Upper Pitt Street and working as a milliner again. She herself died in 1852 and her son in 1859.
Of all the children the second son, Joshua (b 1824), seems to have had the least troubled life, following the sort of career that might have been expected of a merchant’s son. He started off as a pawnbroker but soon became a book keeper, working in later years for a railway company. He seems to have achieved modest affluence that extended to a family servant. He married Elizabeth Ann Atkins in 1849, acquiring responsibility over many years for her mother and wider family. She and Joshua had two children – Amelia (b 1850) and Alice (b 1852) – and lived in Toxteth Park. Amelia and Alice never married: Amelia became the principal of a private school, while Alice was an art teacher. Joshua died in 1889 at the age of 65 and his wife in 1894.
Little is known of Margaret (b 1826). She worked a straw-bonnet maker after her father’s death and never married. At some point in the 1850s she became the first of four members of her family to move to Buckley, a predominantly mining and pottery community in Flintshire. What prompted her to go is unclear but, with the marriages of Sarah Jane in 1853 and Emma, William and John Head in 1857 and with her mother Mary Ann going to live with William, she soon had little choice but to move on. One possibility is that the choice of Buckley was in some way connected to Sarah Jane’s mother-in-law, who was born in nearby Hawarden. In late 1861 Margaret was still in Buckley, caring for her younger sister Emma in her last illness. Nothing more is known of her but again one can speculate that she was in some way responsible for the subsequent (and rather curious) move to Spon Green of her elder sister Elizabeth and younger brother William.
John Head (b 1828), like his grandfather Joshua, became a mariner and in late 1857 he married Mary Underwood Croston, the daughter of John Croston, a prominent block maker who had died in 1843. Earlier in 1857 John Head’s younger sister Emma had married Mary’s younger brother William Croston. These two families had much in common, with the premature deaths of the family heads leaving their large families in straightened circumstances. With John Head away at sea, Mary ran a lodging-house at their home in Upper Pitt Street. They had no children of their own but at various times looked after children of their siblings. In an 1865 trade directory John is shown to have become a Customs Officer but at the end of that year he died at the age of 37. His wife Mary got married again in 1868 to a (much younger) coachman called William Dawson and lived in Toxteth Park till she died in 1878.
Like her sisters, Sarah Jane (b 1834) worked for some years as a straw-bonnet maker but at just 19 years old in 1853 she was the youngest to get married. Her husband John Bennion Reynolds was clerk to a wine merchant, seemingly from a comparatively affluent family but his father Thomas had died some years before. The Reynolds family came from Hawarden in Flintshire but John was born in Liverpool in 1829. The couple spent their first years of married life in Toxteth Park before moving further out to Thingwall in West Derby and then the adjacent Broad Green. While there they lived close to Sarah Jane’s eldest sister Elizabeth in Thingwall and youngest brother William in Old Swan. John and Sarah Jane had four children: Emily (b 1854, also known as Emma), William Henry (b 1857), Lucy Margaret (b 1859) and Annie Louisa (b 1861). However, only months after the birth of their fourth child, John died in 1862, leaving Sarah Jane a widow at the age of 28. Sarah Jane is next heard of in 1881 as a stewardess on a ship, her son William also being a ship’s steward. By then she was living in Wavertree and it is no small irony that a short distance away in Victoria Park was the home of her first cousin John Bankes Walmsley (son of her father John’s elder brother James), then still a ship broker but well on the way to establishing his own shipping line. By 1891 Sarah Jane had retired and was living with her unmarried daughters Emily and Annie. (Lucy, a school teacher, had married in 1890 and moved to Dudley in the Midlands.) Sarah Jane died in West Derby in 1892 at the age of 57.
> William Walmsley b1830 (brother) >> Emma Walmsley b1835 (sister)