Joseph Barraclough (1755-1839) was the son of James, a cutler.  Joseph was apprenticed to Samuel Warburton, a cutler at Bridgehouses, and became a Freeman in 1783.  He married Hannah and they had a son, Joseph Jun. (bapt. 1788-1854).  Joseph took on as an apprentice John Rowbotham (1770-1846), who became a Freeman in 1791.   The Rowbothams were grocers, who branched into cutlery (Wingfield, Rowbotham).  In 1787, Joseph Barraclough and the father of John Rowbotham – also named John (c.1741-1820) – registered a silver mark from ‘bottom of Scotland Street’.  In 1791, Joseph’s wife, Hannah, died and in the following year he married Mary, the daughter of John Rowbotham (Sheffield Public Advertiser, 30 March 1792).  The Barraclough and Rowbotham partnership, Joseph Barraclough & Co, ended in 1793.  In the Sheffield directory (1797), Joseph Barraclough was listed as a fine pen-knife manufacturer at Meadow Street.  He began a partnership with James Johnson (possibly the grocer, who was listed in Trippet Lane), but this was dissolved in 1801.  Joseph began training his son as a knife-maker in 1802, but neither men appeared again in a Sheffield directory.  Joseph Barraclough died at Radford Street in 1839, aged 83, and was buried at St Paul’s on 22 April.  His son had moved to East Retford, where in 1833 he had married Jane Billyard.  In the Census (1851), Joseph was a cutler and hardware dealer at Carolgate, East Retford.  He died there on 8 October 1854, aged 66, ‘after a sudden attack of apoplexy’ (Sheffield Independent, 14 October 1854).  Jane died in 1872, aged 73.