William Catchpole, our Great Great Grandfather, was born in Laxfield, Suffolk in 1802, the younger son of Edward Catchpole and Elizabeth Wake.   

We had some difficulty at first in pinning down exactly when William was born. There were conflicting records, some indicating a birth year around 1802, others suggesting a few years later. The mystery was resolved when we were able to see the baptism register for Laxfield in Lowestoft Records Office in 2014.  There is a register entry for 1802 showing that William was baptised privately. Private baptisms often were conducted when a baby was weak and thought unlikely to survive. In the event William did survive and there is another entry in 1807 with him being introduced to the church. This was a baptism ceremony where in effect he was rebaptised in the church.

William became a tailor by trade. He probably learnt the trade as an apprentice in his home village. Tailoring in those days was carried out in workshops where the tailors sat cross legged on big tables, as in the heading picture.  It was common for tailors to be contracted to visit large houses or institutions to carry out tailoring work.

The period when William was growing up in Laxfield was one of economic decline with the advent of weaving mills in the north of England.  So it's no surprise that when William gets married in 1830 he's now living in London. He married Ann Riley in Shoreditch on 1st Feb 1830, the bottom entry on this page of the register.

Both William and Ann were able to write their own names, which was not always the case in 1830. In the other two marriages on the page there are several people who couldn't write and made a mark instead. One of the witnesses is a George Yarrow. He is a witness also for the first marriage on the page. Someone who appears as a witness in multiple marriages often turns out to be someone who works for the church, a churchwarden perhaps, who is called upon to witness marriages where there are no friends or relatives present. I've had a look through this register and George Yarrow appears regularly as a witness. The other witness James Cracknell doesn't appear as a witness on any other marriages, and further research reveals him to be another tailor from Laxfield, Suffolk. And in Laxfield there is a Charles Cracknell who is a master tailor. So we can surmise that James Cracknell served an apprenticeship at the same time as William Catchpole, and they moved to London together. James was perhaps the only guest at the wedding. 

Ann Riley had come to London from even further away than William. She was from Burnley in Lancashire. Her father William Riley was a weaver, probably with cotton. So there is a common connection, both the Catchpoles and the Rileys were weaving families. How and why Ann travelled all the way from Lancashire to London is a mystery, but there was high unemployment in the Burnley area in the 1820s so she was probably looking for employment. It seems quite plausible that the work she was doing was connected with textiles or cloth because of her background. And with William Catchpole in the tailoring trade it's easy to see how their paths might have crossed.

Over the following 20 years or so they moved to several different addresses that we know of, settling in the infamous Seven Dials area of St Giles. The area was notorious for being one of the worst slum areas in London - we saw it in an earlier narrative about the Osborne family.

Here's a view of their complete family.

Their first child William  provides us with an interesting mystery. What we know about his birth is derived from his baptism record, which very surprisingly took place in Cambridge, in the Methodist Chapel. The first reaction is to suspect that this baptism is for a different William Catchpole, but close inspection shows that the parents are William and Ann, she was formerly Riley, and he is a tailor. So it's definitely correct, but what are they doing in Cambridge? We never see them there again, by 1834 they're back in London. It's most likely that they moved there temporarily for a tailoring contract. And have they fallen out with the Church of England?

Their second child Righteous was baptised in 1834, back in London where they're living at 7 Castle Street, St Giles. The infamous seven dials area. The name Righteous seems to be a Catchpole name - we saw William's brother called Righteous, the schoolmaster in Laxfield. But apart from in the 1841 census we never see Righteous again. However, we do suddenly see a George Catchpole in 1851 for whom there is no birth record. It seems possible that Righteous has changed his name to George, but even he disappears from the records, and we never see either of them again.

They had several more children, always in the Seven Dials area, but no more of them are baptised. We have the birth certificate for Margaret Mary, our Great Grandmother. This has an unusual item of information on it - the time of birth, 5pm. The time was usually recorded only in the case of multiple births - so was she a twin? There isn't another birth recorded so if that was the case, the twin died at birth.

Their last child Edward James was the third of that name, the other two dying as infants. They obviously weren't superstitious.

William continued as a tailor living an unremarkable life, dying in 1855, two years after his wife.