Hannah Lewis
One of the gravestones at the Chapel carries the following inscription – “Hannah wife of William Lewis died 17th May 1823 aged 45 years”. Could her husband, William Lewis, be the son of Ann Rosser who was baptised in 1786? I investigated this proposition.
There is a marriage between a William Lewis and a Hannah Hughes in Llanfihangel Pont-y-Moel on the 28th April 1816 and they registered a child, Rebecca, in Newport St Woolos on the 21st March 1819. Of interest is that the baptism entry states that William is a Farmer in Earlswood.
It is difficult to “come forward” in family research so I approached this problem by looking at the Public Family Trees on the Ancestry site to see if Rebecca featured in any families. In the event several public trees contained a Rebecca Lewis living in the right place at the right time. I was then able to identify a marriage for Rebecca and to find the family unit in the 1841 Census.
The surname of her spouse is spelt “Blaidon” in this entry but is usually spelt as “Bladon”. We can also note that she is cited as a minor in the entry which is consistent with her date of birth as being in 1819.
Although the 1841 Census entries do not carry family relationships I think it is safe to presume that the William Lewis in this entry is Rebecca’s father. He gives an age of 70 – which, if correct, places his real age as being between 70 and 74. He is at least 15 years too old to be the son of Ann Rosser baptised in 1786.
New information, May 2018
Following contact from a descendant of William Lewis and Hannah Hughes who lives in Canada I have carefully reviewed this family. I have now found an 1861 Census entry – see below – that has William Lewis living with his daughter, Rebecca, her husband, John Bladon, and their children. In this entry he gives an age of 71. This is at a high variance from the 70 he quoted in 1841! It puts him in the right place at the right time to be a son of Ann Rosser as this age entry implies a year of birth of about 1790 which is only 4 years different from 1786, when Ann’s son William was born.
This birth date evidence is “very compelling” and it would not surprise me that William is a son of Ann Rosser. Further, I suspect that Rebecca is his only child as his wife, Hannah, died only four years after Rebecca was born and there is no evidence that he remarried. What is then interesting is that in my part of the tree, everyone is a descendant of the “Tiplin” family, and in this part of Ann’s tree, if proven, everyone is a descendant of the “Bladon” family.
