My latest generation of Walkdens is shaping up nicely. We now have nine children born to my 6x great-grandparents Nathan and his wife Elee/Elce between 1735 and 1750. All the baptisms took place at St George’s Church, Unsworth, and several come with a stunning colour image of the register. But a row of names and birth years isn’t enough – even this far back, with only parish records to go on, an hour or so’s extra research can sometimes put a bit more flesh on the bones and build a fuller picture of the family’s life.
Flesh on the bones probably isn’t the best phrase under the circumstances, mind, because bones are where I’m headed now. Burials, in other words. I know that not all of the Walkden children survived infancy – we’ve already found the burials of Sarah in 1735 (just eight weeks old) and, on a damaged page of the register, a daughter in 1740 who had a very short name. Almost certainly that’s Jane, christened 1736, as the only other girl born pre-1740 was Shusanna, and she’s too long to fit. What of the others though? It’s easy to come a cropper by not checking death records and marrying off someone who died as a baby, so let’s take a quick look before we go much further.