Thanks Dawn and Derek.
I have been researching for so long that I am very content with Charles and Judith!
I have been putting together a timeline for Charles and I find his early years rather moving. When he was age 13 he was given an apprenticeship by the Bridewell Royal Hospital. After about eight years training as a silk weaver under Mr Phillips, when he was 21, Charles married Judith and, in the same year, was given the Freedom of the City and was “set-up for himself in his said trade, in his own house, next door but one to the Golden Ball in St John Street, Spittle Fields”. The next year, 1740, on the 17th May, he baptised his first baby; a son that he named Charles Daniel (Daniel, as you know, being the name of Judith's father).
In the minutes of the Bridewell Royal Hospital, Court-of-Governors meeting, of 5th June 1740, it says that two of the governors had visited Charles and found him to be “a diligent and sober man” and, as a result, they awarded him a “Lock’s Gift” of £10. Five days after that, on the 10th June, he buried his baby son.
In his long life, he saw the houses on London bridge demolished (when he was 40), the medieval walls of London demolished (when he was 49) and, two years before he died, the first aerial voyage from English soil took place only a stones-throw from where he lived in Bethnal Green. On the 15th February 1784, Vincenzo Lunardi took-off in a balloon from the Artillery Ground in Finsbury. It was the sensation of the age.
And most of us on this thread are related to Charles and Judith. What more can anyone ask!
