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« on: Tuesday 25 October 22 10:55 BST (UK) »
Further developments!
I've realised that William Hamlyn, butcher of Seven Dials, London, was not one and the same as William Henry Hamlyn, butcher of Seven Dials, London (as is assumed by everyone else on Ancestry etc). William Henry Hamlyn was William Hamlyn's son. Everything makes sense now. William Henry Hamlyn was baptised at St Giles in the Fields in 1810, the second child of William and Grace Hamlyn. He later married Sarah Carr and emigrated in about 1840 (possibly when his father went into the workhouse) to Quebec and had most of his children there.
So I've been searching for a William Hamlyn marriage to a Grace prior to their first child being born in 1808 and the only one I can find is in Wembury in Devon in December 1800 - to a Grace Cornish. He remarried in 1834 - to Johanna Sullivan. Elsewhere on Rootschat I've posted a request for handwriting experts who might be able to decide whether the two signatures of William Hamlyn are written by the same hand. Of course, with 34 years between them, there was plenty of time for alteration, but my hunch is that it is one and the same man, although I will have to account for the gap between the marriage and their first child being born in 1808.
The other thing I now know about him is that he had a brother, Henry, in whose house his second child by Johanna, prior to their marriage, was born. I might add that we already know that William was not born in Middlesex (1841 census).
If I am right about the signatures, William was from Plymouth.