Excerpt from An Historical and Topographical Description of the Town and Parish of Bury

Of the eleven children of his father and mother seven died in infancy; the manuscript gives an account of the dates of their births and deaths.

In early life james butterworth followed the occupation of a hand-loom weaver, and at the age of twenty-one he had the courage to take to wife one Hannah Boyton, and very soon had a large family to support out of his meagre earnings. On the introduction of labour-saving machinery into the district Butterworth, along with others, found that he must look around for a better paid employ ment if he was to keep the wolf from the door, and in this strait he turned schoolmaster.

It was at this period of his life that he first essayed authorship and published a collection of poems entitled A Dish of Hodge Podge, under the pseudonym of Paul Bobbin, though previous to this he had edited a few numbers of a short lived periodical entitled The Manchester Literary and Political Repository. His poetical produc tions are not of much account, and it is by his antiquarian and genealogical labours that he will be best remembered. He was of a very painstaking nature, and gathered together a great mass of interesting matter relating to his native county that would otherwise have remained unknown.

Of his ten children, the youngest, Edwin, attained like his father, some distinction as a local antiquary. Much of the material collected by the father was made use of by the son in his histories of Oldham, Middleton, and other works of a similar nature.

Edwin butterworth assisted Edward Baines in the compilation of his History of Lancashire, and so great had become the accumulation of material that he projected a great history of the county to be completed in fifty volumes; Sam Bamford was approached with a view to his joining in this grand scheme, as it was thought that the easy style of the great radical and Butterworth's facts would form an excellent combination; but Bamford scouted the ambitious idea, and Edwin dying shortly afterwards the project fell through.

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