Page expansion and revision begun 28 October 2024
I so far have four generations of this Cumberland family, and owe much of the initial framework and some harder-to-find details to the kindness of John M Wilson who shared with me the fruits of research he had commissioned.
At least some of this family seem to have been Quakers, though some marriages etc. were in the Church of England - perhaps because they were marrying non-Quakers.
7. Joseph TOMLINSON of Dean, later 1700s More
6. Joseph TOMLINSON (abt 1776-1830) who married Jane WALKER More
5. John TOMLINSON (1815-1904) of Whitehaven who married Sarah KITCHINMore
4. Sarah Jane TOMLINSON (1846-1888) who married Joseph Robinson WILLIAMSON - further details on his page.
Joseph TOMLINSON - listed at Dean in 1777 as the father of Joseph TOMLINSON below.
Joseph married Jane WALKER in 1809 at Dean but later lived in and near the port of Whitehaven on the west Cumberland coast.
John went into business and was employed as a clerk in 1841 (aged about 25) and specifically as a merchant's clerk in 1845 aged about 30 - both while living in Whitehaven, a port town very near to Parton where he had been born. In that year he married Sarah KITCHIN in Liverpool in 1845, but he was always Whitehaven resident and that is where they lived.
A digression on John and Sarah's marriage which I promised on (A HREF=" https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Tomlinson-6605">WikiTree so if you have come here from that page, welcome and thank you for your interest. Although John remained was born in Parton and resident in Whitehaven in Cumberland and Sarah was originally from Irton near Gosforth also in Cumberland, they married a long county away in Liverpool, and by licence, which I think was slightly unusual for their class and period. Also it was not witnessed by anyone sharing a surname with either of them. And obviously it was in neither of their birthplaces, though Sarah does say on the certificate that she was resident in Liverpool. I wonder whether there's a story there.
I wondered whether she might have been pregnant. The first child of the marriage that I know of was Sarah Jane, born under 15 months after the marriage, so there is technically time for Sarah to have been pregnant when she married, completed that pregnancy, conceived again and given birth to Sarah Jane, but it seems less than probable.
It could just be that Sarah had migrated to the city as a young adult finding work, John visited the city, probably on business, and they met and decided to marry. Perhaps John got the licence to show his white-collar status, or perhaps they just didn't want to waste any time. Sarah had left home before this, most likely appearing in the 1841 census in Gosforth as a servant. So maybe she thought she would have better prospects in the big city.And/or perhaps their parents did not approve of the match. He was from a Quaker family and she was not, so either or both families may have had a problem with that. They married in the Church of England, which was certainly against Quaker rules and John's community would have officially disapproved, even if his immediate family were more relaxed. As far as I can tell Sarah was of working class status, lower than John as the white-collar son of a skilled worker - this might perhaps have been an issue.
Digression over. John's career progressed - he described himself as an accountant in 1846, and 'clerk and assistant to corn merchant' in 1851. By the 1860s he was a grain merchant or corn merchant himself, and in his old age (1881 and 1901) he was a distributor of stamps (a government job related to taking taxes and revenues and stamping goods or giving stamps as proof of payment, not just postage stamps).
John and Sarah had children. The ones I have identified are:
Sarah Jane 1846
Ellen Nora about 1848
Perhaps William H about 1851 (but only found listed at school so not confirmed in this family)
Eldred Edward 1856
Sarah Jane is in one document described as their 'eldest' daughter (in a document which uses 'elder' for the elder of two) so I have a suspicion that there may have been another daughter, perhaps in the 1850s. But I have not located her and she's not with the family in 1861 so if she ever existed she may have died young. Worth looking in Quaker birth records for the time, if possible. Maybe also death registers for a young death in Whitehaven.
Poor Eldred did die before reaching his full age, at 20 in 1876.
Sarah Jane married Joseph Robinson WILLIAMSON in Whitehaven in 1868. See his page for her married life and early widowhood. However, by about 1885 Sarah had developed cancer. When she died in 1888 both she and her mother were living in Moresby - perhaps hoping the sea air would be good for her?
Ellen Nora married John Armstrong in 1870, and she was the one who survived both her parents - see below.
The family lived on Albion Street in Whitehaven while bringing up their children - they are enumerated at number 6 in 1851 with the two girls, and at number 9 in 1861 with just Eldred. (And they were at number 4 in 1846 when Sarah Jane was born. I'm not sure whether they kept moving short distances or whether the street kept being renumbered.) In 1861 neither girl was enumerated with them - they were both at Brookfield, a Quaker boarding school in Wigton, Cumberland.
I have not found the Tomlinsons at all in the 1871 census.
In 1881 they were at a different address in Whitehaven, on Plumblands Lane (next door to John's sister Martha).
If you are interested in this line I'll be very pleased indeed to hear from you. Email me at deletethis.ianwilliamson161@gmail.com but delete everything up to and including the first dot, leaving just my name and number @ service provider. Please do not delete the automatically-generated subject line, so that I know your email is not spam. You can add more to the subject if you like but if you delete what appears I may not read your mail.