This is just a quick note to thank Andy J2022 very much for the most helpful links to the railway companies. I have saved them all carefully to my own computer! I was hoping to start research today, but had to finish a complicated section of writing. During this, I did establish one minor point about literacy in the Lewises. Rees Lewes, the railwayman, could at least sign his name in 1837 (unlike a Lincolnshire shepherd ancestor of mine in the same period)! I am impressed by this. (There is of course an fascinating later tradition of skilled Welsh railway workers in England. The grandfather of the poet Edward Thomas was a railway fitter living in the railway quarter in Swindon...) Sophia, Rees Lewes' wife, could not write. But although her two elder children were reared in a period before a national system of education, while Sophia, as a single mother, was working, either as a Straw Plaiter or a paid 'Housekeeper', both her children were taught at least to write their names. This, too, I think is impressive. I was checking the evidence and noted that Rees' daughter, my ancestor, signed a death certificate with a cross, although she had managed a slightly botched signature in the Parish register for her wedding. just a few months earlier. I've noticed this tendency elsewhere amongst working-class, early Victorian women. It is impossible to know if they found writing too difficult when upset and facing a Registrar, or whether the Registrar assumed that they couldn't write... But I am glad to see that Rees' rather unusual literacy (of some kind) did continue! The next generation, of course, had schools available... I look forward now to going back and trying to establish what happened to 'Rees Lewes' in the early English railway industry. I will report any significant findings... Meanwhile, thank you again!
