Mary and Eliza: Just a few Years Later ...!

It's sometimes the case when you're researching a family that you become so focussed on a particular household and the individuals in it that you lose sight of what brought you 'through their door', as it were. As I've recently picked up the threads of my family history, I've very much started again where I left off before moving house.  But I was reminded this week that this phase of research began last Autumn with a desire to fill in some of the gaps in, and lack of documentation of, the family of my maternal grandfather's maternal grandmother, Eliza Jolly, née Burlingham.

After several months chasing up and down the Burlingham (or Bullingham, which adds to the excitement ... or confusion!) generations, this week I was on the trail of one Mary Ann Claydon, who became the wife of George Bullingham on Christmas day, 1857.  Mary was born in Wattisfield, Suffolk, on 1st December 1835 and was baptised on 24th April following at the Independent Chapel in the village.  Her elder siblings had been baptised in the parish church, but presumably their parents William and Ann had changed their allegiance over the intervening years.

In 1841, the family appeared in Walsham Road, Wattisfield, and I started looking for the 16-year-old Mary in 1851.  Without too much trouble, I found her in Diss, where she was the general servant in the household of William Barkham in the Market Place there.  William was a cabinet maker, and presumably had a prosperous business, employing nine men, while his wife Eliza was described as a seller of Berlin wool (I wonder what that distinction signifies).  The household was completed by the presence of their children Henry and Catherine.

As I entered the family to my records, I noticed that I had already visited that page of the census and looked back to find that just round the corner in St Nicholas' Street was the Bobby family, where I had identified their servant as one Eliza Jolly, 20 years old and also born in Wattisfield.  Now this unmarried Eliza was not the focus of my entire project, but the elder sister of her eventual husband.  Eliza was born on 30th June 1829 (so she was a little more than 20 years old), the eldest daughter of Stephen Jolly of Wattisfield and his second wife Frances Sutton.  She was baptised at Wattisfield on 10th April 1831.  Regrettably, I've been unable to trace any record of her after 1851. 

The Bobby household was somewhat greater than that of the Barkham family.  In addition to James, a linen draper, and Mary his wife, their three daughters and baby Angell James (I wonder whether, at four months, he was as angelic as his name foretold) there were a milliner, two apprentices and a nursemaid, as well as Eliza, their general servant.

The Bobby family became well-known in the town. Several generations later, their shop was virtually a department store in the Market Place, and I remember one of their descendants being at school at the same time as me.  Of the Barkhams, however, I know nothing.  What became of the cabinet maker and the Berlin wool seller?

And then there are their servants.  Although one was some four or five years the elder, given that these two young ladies were both from the same small village and now living in Diss only a few hundred yards apart, I think it unlikely that they didn't know one another.  My curiosity is, of course, unanswerable; did they keep in touch?  Were they aware of the threads that brought them so close together again when, on 15th October 1858, Eliza's brother John Jolly married the sister of Mary's husband of less than a year, George Bullingham?