Thomas Blacketer is my 3x great grandfather. His birth is registered 1817 with the Barking Meeting of the Society of Friends (that is, the Quakers). For more about his family, you may read the post Some Quaker Roots. The BMD Marriage Index for Jun1845 W Ham 12 412 has the names of Thomas Blacketer and Martha Greenfield, which makes sense of his married census returns recording a Martha Blacketer, born about 1820 in Guildford, Surrey. Along with the Blacketers and Greenfields, I kept coming across Bottings.
Greenfield is not an uncommon name in Surrey, at least, not uncommon in the early 19th century according to the ancestry search engine. Add "Guildford" to the search, and it looks like a single family. One of those census returns is from 1851, the household of a widow, George Hart, Grocer at 185 High Street, Deptford, Kent, and his three servants. One of them is Assistant in his grocer's shop. The other two are General Servants, both women, and their names are:
Sarah Botting Unmarried 66 born in Petworth, Sussex
Harriet Greenfield Unmarried 28 born in Guildford, Surrey
Sarah would be born about 1785, and Harriett about 1823. The pair are also George Hart's servants in the 1841 England Census at the same address.
You may recall that Thomas Blacketer's mother was originally Elizabeth Botting, born about 1787 in Petworth, Sussex. That is too much of a coincidence for me, suggesting that Sarah Botting was Thomas's aunt, while Harriet Greenfield was his sister-in-law.
Proving the latter turns out to be fairly easy. The parish register of Guildford St Mary records the baptism on 17 September 1820 of Martha daughter of Thomas and Mary Greenfield. His occupation is listed as Butcher. The same parish register for 5 January 1823 records the baptism of Harriet, daughter of the same parents. Including these two, I found five Greenfield siblings baptized at Guildford St Mary between 1812 and 1823. Here they are:
Elizabeth 5 April 1812
(this record is in a different format with daughter of Thomas Greenfield only)
Edward 9 October 1814
Sarah 26 June 1816
Martha 17 September 1820
Harriet 5 January 1823
(the remaining four are all for Thomas Greenfield, Butcher, and his wife Mary)
Although I could find no records for Elizabeth or Edward, I did find the following:
Harriet married William Simmonds Carman 18 September 1853 at St Giles Cripplegate, Middlesex. The witnesses to her wedding were James and Mary Botting. This corresponds to Sep1853 East London 1c 84. The presence of the Bottings here is no coincidence. William Simmonds's family's census returns are easy to track. In the 1841 England Census they live on East Street (or church Street) in Petworth, Sussex next door to James Botting (Age 25) Fishmonger, and his wife Sarah (Age 20 - the ages in the 1841 census are supposed to be rounded to the nearest 5). Looking ahead to the 1861 England Census, although William is no longer living at home, his father's household on census night includes John Botting (Age 44, born in Petworth); John is the brother of William's mother, whose maiden name was evidently Botting.
Sarah married Thomas Joseph Adey 22 December 1844 at St John Hackney, Middlesex. Joseph Blacketer (Thomas's father) and Martha Greenfield (his future wife) witnessed this marriage. This corresponds to Dec1844 Hackney 3 125.
Among papers that had been sent to me several years ago, I belatedly found a copy of the marriage certificate of Thomas Blacketer and Martha Greenfield, solemnized in 1845 at the Parish Church in the Parish of West Ham, Essex:
May 18 Thomas Blacketer Full Age Bachelor Shoemaker West Ham
father: Joseph Blacketer Watchmaker
Martha Greenfield Full Age Spinster West Ham
father: Thomas Greenfield Butcher
One of the witness signatories is Harriet Greenfield, Martha's sister. The other is Thomas Joseph Adey, her brother-in-law, which certainly ties some of the above together.
As to Martha's parents, Thomas and Mary Greenfield, I can find little information. According to the BMD Death Index, one Thomas Greenfield died Mar1853 Guildford 2a 28. However, I am dissuaded from buying this one, since there are two more Thomas Greenfields who died in Petworth, Sussex in the 1840s. As for Mary Greenfields, I find three death records in Petworth alone for the 1840s. At $15 per certificate, it could work out expensive to find the correct one by trial and error!
There are several Thomas Greenfield marriages in Surrey, one of which is to a Mary Botting. This is for 24 March 1808 in the parish register of Stoke St John the Evangelist, which is in Guildford, Surrey. If this is the correct record, that could make Thomas Blacketer and Martha Greenfield cousins of some degree, but I have no evidence as yet.
A search for Bottings in the first half of the nineteenth century shows many families across Sussex, including Petworth. One way forward from here (actually backward in time) will be to build a Botting family tree. This may help me to figure out how each of the Bottings above are related to each other, and then to other people in my tree. A public member tree already exists with Bottings back to about 1600, and when I return to this branch of the family, that may well direct my future research.
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