Judith Brooks was Ari’s 4x great-grandmother. She was born in Middleton-by-Wirksworth in Derbyshire on 23 Jan 1828 and baptised at St Mary’s Church in Wirksworth on the 2nd of March. In the 1841 census she is thirteen, living in Town Street, Middleton, with her parents Thomas and Mary, older brother Charles, and younger sister Martha. On 30 Oct 1848 she married William Spencer at Holy Trinity Church, an event captured in several local newspapers. This is from the Derby Mercur

For several of Ari’s ancestors, I know very little about their lives. I thought I’d do a post about Frances, one of his 6x great-grandmothers, to illustrate this. Apart from her burial record, the census records for 1841, 1851 and 1861 are all I have found for her so far. Frances (or Fanny) was born in about 1782 in Ashbourne, Derbyshire. I don’t know when or where she married, but her first child, John Williams, was baptised on 8 Nov 1807 in Cawston, Norfolk, which was where

Hannah Cox was Ari’s 7x great-grandmother, born in about 1748. She lived in Corfe Castle, Dorset, and died in March 1816. She is buried in the churchyard at St Edward, King & Martyr. Luckily, a census for Corfe Castle was conducted by William Morton Pitt, and it has been transcribed and made available (see http://www.opcdorset.org/CorfeCastleFiles/CorfeCastleCensus1790.htm). At the time, the population of Corfe Castle was 1239. We can see Hannah after the death of her husband