Hello. I've gone back to my notes and this was my reasoning at the time:
I looked up the Beenham registers at the archives in Reading and found the following:
1827
John s/o Charles & Elizabeth Cheeseman lab b. Nov. 22
Unlike all the other christenings, there was no date given for this having happened. So I wondered whether the vicar was simply recording this birth on hearsay and had got the name wrong, because the census returns record a Jesse who was born in 1827, but not a John.
There are two Jonathans, of course. The first died a year or so before the second was born.
Lot was christened Lot and is Lot in the earliest censuses he features in. I reckon he styled himself 'Charles' after his marriage and he is C.L thereafter. After all, it would be a cruel lot for his wife - to be known as Lot's wife - with all the inevitable jokes about pillars of salt!
I am descended from his first marriage - to Emma Hamlyn. I've just received Lot's death certificate, by the way, and can send you a scan of it if you like. Emma Hamlyn's a bit of mystery. She is the daughter of William Hamlyn, butcher. I've found her christening, I think - 8 Feb 1835 at St Botolph Bishopsgate, and she is in the Shoreditch Nursery for Poor Children in 1841. At any rate, this child's father is a butcher at Seven Dials (featured in Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz). The father, William Hamlyn is listed as a butcher at that address in Pigot's Directory of 1839. He then turns up in 1841 in the St Giles' Workhouse, where he died in 1843. He is not born in the county, and I've found it impossible to trace where he came from originally. I'd love to know - it remains one of my biggest blocks!
Best wishes,
Dizzy
