A John Barratt married Anne/Anne Awberry or Ahberry who was born in Denham by Uxbridge, Buckinghamshire, on 16 April 1770. This marriage would have been around 1795. We are still not sure if this is our John Barrett/Barratt.
Our ancestors Thomas Barratt and James Barratt seem to be the sons of the above John and Ann/Anne.
In his searches in church records in the 1980s, my brother David found the following information:
Thomas Barratt married Sophia Sleigh, daughter of William Sleigh and Anne Hollies? on 21 Nov 1813 in Longdon, Staffs.
If this is Thomas Barratt, bookbinder, then he must have moved from Oxford to Staffordshire and would have been in his early thirties at the time of the marriage. This makes more sense than my earlier suggestion that one of these Barratts must have been only in his mid or late teens when he married, I think.
Thomas and Sophia had two children: William and Mary Anne Barratt. Mary Anne was christened (baptized) 25 May 1814 at Brereton/Armitage, Staffordshire. She seems to have married a Daniel? Bird. It is possible that their daughter Anne Barratt Bird married a Samuel Liversage at Armitage on 15 May 1875.
William Barratt was born on 13 July 1816 (at 6.15am) and was privately baptized at the parish church of St Phillips and St Jacobs. He was afterward baptized again at the parish church of Armitage, Staffordshire. This double baptism might indicate that he was born a sickly child, and not expected to live. He died in Armitage, Staffordshire, in about 1842, aged 28, when his son William George was only about four years old.
He was a bookseller in London. In the 1800s, Albion Buildings and Bartholomew Close, London, where William and Anne Barratt lived, had a number of residents associated with printing and books.
William Barratt, bookseller
J.Masters and Co., Printers, Albion Buildings
Smith & Son, Binders, Albion Buildings
J. and C. Adlard, printers, Bartholomew Close
Albion Buildings comprised several old buildings which had been ‘fitted up so as to lodge decently about twenty-four families’. In 1861, there were 93 tenants. During that year, there were three deaths, all children under the age of ten. In modern London, the names Bartholomew and Albion are, as far as I can ascertain, still identifiable in the area between The Barbican and Newgate Street, as is Smithfield, a name of which relates to the next section on infant mortality.
William married Anne Kemp, c.1816–c.1890. They had three children. Anne Barratt was born 15 April 1839 and died 27 December 1840. Mary Barratt was born 17 June 1840 and died 6 March 1852. Both were buried at the New Bunhill Fields burial ground in London. There are details of that historic place, and of times of cholera, in my family tree books.
William and Anne had a son William George Barratt, born 26 March 1838 at Oxford, died 17 March 1901 at Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire. He was my grandfather, and a remarkable man.
Widowed in her early 20s, Anne Barratt née Kemp remarried 10 December 1856, to Richard Padbury, a sawyer of Wellesbourne, Warwickshire. They had no children, but I have been in touch with descendants of other members of the Padbury line.
The inscriptions in Mary Barratt's Bible are in two apparently different handwritings. Perhaps they were both made by William, in varying states of health. Although the Bible was given to Anne before she married him, there is no entry for her. The fault in the gutter shows that a page was been neatly cut out. We know that Anne was illiterate, but the fact that the Bible has been handed down indicates that it came to us via the Barratt descendants, because she remarried after William died young.