The story of the Finches has just irrevocably changed from the country to the city although they don't really know it yet. William Finch, born in January 1713, has moved to Bethnal Green. I'm not sure but I think he took up lodgings with William and Mary Ansell in...
When the Finches lived in lovely rural Hertfordshire, what did they eat? William Finch took the story of my ancestors back to the rural edge of London. The Finches were agricultural labourers or small traders in the town. Although they weren’t really peasants...
William Finch's birth was registered in January 1713 in a small rural town called Bishops Stortford, in Hertfordshire. William was a path breaker in my family. He was the last of the traditional agricultural workers in the family. He led the way from the country to...
The Colemans, Richard Finch’s in-laws, had been Protestant for generations by the time they marriage united the family with the Finches. Sarah’s great-grandfather, a successful draper was baptized in an Anglican church, St Andrew The Less. Her grandfather Jonas...
Between 1704 and 1711 Richard Finch and many members of the Coleman family underwent a number of adult baptisms in Little Hadham, Hertfordshire. Richard was christened two years before his marriage to Sarah, when he was 20. Sarah’s sister was baptized as a 20 year old...
The alliance between Richard Finch, the second son of Thomas and Ann, and Sarah Coleman greatly improved the financial and social standing of the Finches. Richard was elevated to the elder statesman of the Finch family, something we can see in all the Finch wills as...
A new century clicked over, just eight years after Thomas and Ann’s son Richard was born in 1692. Ann was already thirty-six. Nevertheless, he was not the last of her children for, after a gap of nine years, another boy was born to the couple in 1701. They called...
Hertfordshire’s history has been governed by its proximity to London. It doesn’t have good soil but, from the twelfth century, markets were established in the county to supply London with butter, cheese, meat, hides and leather. This led to the establishment of inns...
Theft in Hertfordshire. A wonderful seventeenth-century poem helped the English peasantry express their outrage at the English Enclosure movement, an act which allowed the fencing off of commons land to be sold or given as private property. Who steals the goose off...