| In the same burials I also found that of Moses Hawkins and I remembered that there was a 2yr. old Moses with Sarah on the 1841 Census. Was he that Moses? Off went Barbara again and we were soon looking at that Death Certificate. He died aged just 4 years of convulsions, poor Sarah, another death to contend with. Father of Moses....Aaron Hawkins! We decided to obtain Moses' Birth Certificate to obtain the mother, Sarah's maiden name. There it was, Barbara had found the right marriage, absoloutely spot on! What a find!....Mother....Sarah Hawkins, formerly Malkin! So we were still on the right track! What revelations already! Good old inner tube!! It seemed incredible, Aaron and Sarah, married in the same church as us, nearly two hundred years ago!!!....definitely horses! Incidentally, Sarah Malkin was christened in 1794, at St. John's in Hanley, her parents were Charles and Ann Malkin. Also living with Sarah on the 1851 Census was her other son, William, age 27, he was in fact listed as a Grocer in the Trade Directories of the time, so it's highly likely that the Hawkins family were living at a shop in Sheaf Street. Also living there was Ann, 15yrs., and Hannah, 29yrs. Another interesting member of the family was Mary, just 4 months old, and listed as Sarah's daughter. I was a little suspicious of this, to say the least in view of Sarah's age, so I hunted around for the christening. I wasn't surprised to find that Mary was in fact Hannah's child, she had refused to name the father! Another mystery! Thus ends the first part of our quest, as the journey now leaves Stoke on Trent, we knew not where at this stage. We realised that the journey may have been over and we paused to digest what we had found...."Alfred and Gertrude"......"James and Phoebe"......"John and Charlotte"...."Aaron and Sarah".....we constantly discussed these couples, wondering what they had looked like, what sort of characters they were. Did they have happy lives?Apart from Alfred and Gertrude, they would have been, in all likelihood, poor and no doubt, rough, typical of the majority of people in those times. Could John Hawkins have ever imagined our present world of computers and motor cars....I think not!! The names seem familiar now, but each couple was a joy to find. It was as though we had brought them back to life in some way...as though they had been waiting for us all along, to tell their tale and give us so much enjoyment! They weren't at times easy to find, in fact some of the work was so tedious at times, that it would have been easy to have given up, but we didn't. If I couldn't think of what to do next, then Barbara would come up with something, and we would be up and running again! |
| From Inner Tube to Shoemakers....part 11 |