Over the past few weeks (now that the Duddleston dust has settled), I’ve finally resumed my search for the origins of my Townley family. Earlier attempts, what feels like a century ago, hit brick walls. Even now, there are obstacles to overcome.
They’ve Got the Wrong Man!
Most researchers have come to the conclusion that ‘my’ William Townley was ‘The Rev. William Townley’. He was the vicar of Orpington in Kent and apparently the son of a linen dealer named John Townley. Unfortunately for this to be true it would involve him coming back to London periodically to produce children with his wife Sarah (nee Gussin) and claiming to be a victualler rather than a vicar on baptism records!
According to the Clergy of the Church of England database, at the time of his supposed son Frederick’s birth in Aldgate he was a deacon at Old Windsor in Berkshire. He had moved on to Wyrardsbury, Buckinghamshire as stipendiary curate by 1814, while his family (according to the accepted wisdom of the genealogical community) continued to be raised in Aldgate. Although he was in London for a short while before this he was based in Marylebone, not Aldgate, and by 1816 he had taken up the position of Vicar in Orpington. He remained there until his death. He’s there in the 1841 Census. Tithes were still being paid to him in 1843. Finally, his death, still with the title of Vicar of Orpington is announced in the Gentleman’s Magazine as having occurred on 24th September 1847.
Surely it would have been scandalous and not a little inconvenient to have his family ensconced in London for all that time? Especially when he was rattling around his church-provided Vicarage with only a couple of female servants for company?
I stick to my claim that William Townley, husband of Sarah Gussin, who claimed to be a victualler was….wait for it….a victualler!
William Townley, Victualler not Vicar
It just so happens a William Townley purchased his Freedom of the City of London by redemption through the Innholder’s Company as a victualler in 1803.
John Townley, Gardener not Linen Dealer
The document does indeed name his father as John. But John is not a linen dealer. He is a gardener, and the document tells us where he was from in the margin. Let me turn that image around for you and save your neck.
Great handwriting, huh? And it led me down the garden path, no pun intended. I read the place as being Carshalton. Carshalton is not in Kent, it’s in Surrey, the county next door. Hmmm, it could have been a mistake by a clerk who hadn’t spent much time south of the Thames. I ran it past a ‘jury of my peers’ at The Genealogy Squad without letting on what I thought it said. They unanimously said it was Carshalton, confirming what I had thought. So, I hit the parish registers to try to find John’s death and hopefully William’s baptism.
Nothing.
I ended up searching through a hundred years of the Carshalton parish register the old-fashioned way until I went cross-eyed, not relying on indexes or transcripts, looking for evidence of Townley families in the parish. There was nothing found to indicate that there were Townley families established at Carshalton.
So, if Carshalton doesn’t seem right, Kent might be, right? I looked for places in Kent that had a name that could conceivably be construed from the margin notation and decided to give Charlton a look. There are two Charltons in Kent. One near Dover and one near Woolwich. William and Sarah’s first couple of children were baptised in Southwark, not too far from the Charlton near Woolwich. This wouldn’t likely have been Sarah’s doing, her family was from Epping in Essex. So, I opted to start with investigating that one.
Charlton, not Carshalton
The good news. It seemed Charlton was the location of a grand house with massive gardens, so gardeners would not be unusual there. Secondly, I found a John Townley buried at the parish church in 1798. Promising.
But the bad news was there was very little of the parish register available in the usual places. I extracted what I could find, a grand total of less than ten of them and way too late for my William’s baptism. With a bit of digging, I found that North West Kent FHS had the full parish registers on CD-ROM and ordered a copy from them. While I waited for them to arrive from England, I began the quest to tie up all the Charlton Townley families from any sources I could find in the meantime and ‘FAN club‘ the stuffing out of them.
Robert and Mary Ann (nee Hammond) Townley stood out. He was a blacksmith not a gardener, but he was from Charlton and was baptising children there in the handful of records I’d found. Census records showed he was of an age to possibly be William’s younger brother. So, I built their tree out and down through the years, incorporating clues as to how the other Townleys fit with this family. Gradually they all began to fit together and I was gathering confidence that the local Townley families seemed to spring from one source. Many were gardeners and many also had strong links to Hackney, a massive market gardening area in that era.
Taking a deep breath, I added the word ‘HYPOTHESIS’ in the name suffix box on Ancestry (so as not to confuse anyone) and linked Robert to John the gardener as a son. I was still waiting for the CD so I decided to see whether DNA would help confirm things. Apart from myself, there are four DNA kits I manage that come from that same family line – 2 siblings, a first cousin and a 3rd cousin.
The Townley family emerges
Within hours, common ancestors going back to various children of Robert and Mary Ann began pinging up against all of these kits. My mum’s DNA never made it to Ancestry before she passed away so I went to the site where hers was. Same result, matches that went back to Robert were there too. Carshalton was hurled out of the window and Charlton is definitely where John Townley had died and his children were raised.
I say raised rather than born, because when the CD-ROM arrived, I could only find one baptism of a child to John. Joice Townley was baptised 4th July 1790 to John and Betty.
Joice went on to marry David Lake at St Botolph Bishopsgate in 1807. This was only a third of a mile from St Botolph Aldgate where my William and Sarah were baptising their later children.
So it seems that John arrived in Charlton somewhere between Robert’s approximate birth in 1788 and Joice’s in 1790. It is highly likely he was the 1738 son of Nathaniel Townley, a gardener of Chelsea and his wife Jane (nee Cheasey). Nathaniel and Jane moved to Lewisham (3 miles from Charlton) by 1744 and remained there for the rest of their lives.
Ploughing through the registers it looks like the other children of John and Betty who mostly stayed in Charlton, married and had children, were John, Mary and Thomas. I’ve now built their trees out and down too, looking for more DNA pings. Betty was likely the Elizabeth Townley who witnessed both Mary and my William’s marriages in 1797 at Charlton and 1801 in Aldgate respectively. The signatures are certainly the same person.
Where To From Here For The Townley Family?
Betty at this stage could be Elizabeth Cutter who married John Townley in 1757 at St Botolph without Aldersgate. Or more likely Elizabeth Panter who married John Townley at St Mary Rotherhithe in Southwark in 1766. Or perhaps an entirely different marriage that I haven’t yet found. More work to do, there are some pros and cons to both hypotheses. The next step is to find the baptisms of the pre-Charlton children, including my William. Wish me luck!
So, lousy handwriting nearly put a spanner in the works here. It pays sometimes to not trust your eyes or even the eyes of multiple others when it leads you to dead ends. Be creative, look at all aspects of the writing. I’d still be looking round Carshalton if they hadn’t written Kent next to it. Think outside the squiggle even if it doesn’t make sense. Try it all out. Deeply. FAN club the entire village if you have to. And never assume a victualler is a vicar.