William Blunt of Petersfield (1699-1775) who married Frances Knight. (See Little Nell's excellent description of the family above) had a daughter Martha who married Thomas Clement and four sons who survived into adulthood. We know from his will that Thomas inherited property in Petersfield and the others the equivalent in cash. (I think I wrote in my original post that Robert inherited the property. That was a mistake. Sorry.)
Willilam's son Thomas was probably the Thomas Blunt of Petersfield referred to in the 1773 will of Robert Blunt. He was a mealman. He married Mary Matthews in 1656 had a son Robert who was articled to an attorney and then went bankrupt as a money scrivenger. And according to the latest will, he had another son William. Thomas died in 1792 and left a will that we have not yet seen.
William's son Richard (b 1728) was probably apprenticed to a carpenter in Godalming in 1746 (thanks Lilly). Question: he would have been 17. Wouldn't that have been too old to start as an apprentice carpenter?
Willliam's son Robert (b 1733) seems to have been apprenticed twice, once in Portsea in 1749 when he was 15 and once to John Penfold in St Giles in 1753 when he was 19. (Thanks to Lilly for this too.) This seems odd; the first apprenticeship was for seven years, but the detail of the second one in 1753 mentions seven years starting from 1749 (I think). So perhaps the first master died. Robert may have married in 1760. In 1765, as a widower, he married Martha the widow of a Mr Penfold. John Penfold, apothecary of St Giles, died in about 1762. His will was proved 3 January 1763 and made a bequest to his wife Martha. So Robert married his former boss's widow. Robert died in 1789, with two surviving children, Mary and Richard, both underage so presumably with Martha. I can't find most of the birth, marriage or death records though, just John Penfold's will, Robert's will, Robert's bond to marry Martha and what might be Robert's first marriage.
So it looks as if we have sorted out quite a lot of the family of William Blunt, who was our Robert's uncle. We have placed the Thomas Blunt of Petersfield mentioned in Robert's will (the mealman). And we have shown that our Robert's children had at least two family links to the apothecary business, one to William Harffy (surgeon of Chichester), their uncle (or his father and brother who were apothecaries in Horsham and possibly in London), and one to their cousin Robert Blunt, surgeon and apothecary of Odiham.
Lots of steady progress, for which many thanks.
Alan
PS to JJ. I think that we have come across all these apprenticeship entries for Robert Blunt training to be an apothecary and then taking an apprentice himself before. It's just that before we had help putting the family together we had not known whether he was a relative or not.
