21 July 1744 was the marriage date for my great great great great great great grandparents: Gideon MURCH and Elizabeth BASTIN. And it was a Tuesday.
Gideon was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, in 1721, in the last few years of George I's reign. He lived through the reigns of two more Georges, but only a year after Gideon and Elizabeth's marriage came the attempt to put Bonnie Prince Charlie on the throne.
In later records, Gideon is described as a weaver. Throughout his lifetime, there were several improvements in looms and weaving in general: one of the first was the 'flying shuttle', which made its appearance in 1733. John Kay, who invented it, placed a shuttle at each end of the loom, and one single weaver could knock the shuttle back and forth with amazing speed (previously it had been pushed backwards and forwards, and often needed two weavers). Gideon would have been 12 when the 'flying shuttle' appeared, and was probably an apprentice.
Further innovations in weaving came throughout Gideon's life; he saw the beginnings of how everything had to go faster, be bigger. The 'spinning jenny' came in 1764, the 'water frame' shortly afterwards (a powered textile machine).
Gideon appears in numerous nonconformist records, baptising his children as Protestant Dissenters. He was definitely looking for something. I wonder what his wife thought?
Sunday, 21 July 2013
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Copyright
You may NOT use the contents of this site for commercial purposes without explicit written permission from the author and blog owner. Commercial purposes includes blogs with ads and income generating features, and/or blogs or sites using feed content as a replacement for original content. Full content usage is not permitted.

You Might Also Be Interested In
-
This has to be my favourite address in my family history. Yonder Street, Ottery St Mary, Devon, England was where my MURCH ancestors ...
-
Rootstech is a family history conference (one of the biggest there is). It is held in North America (usually in Salt Lake, Utah) during ...
-
Post a photo of one of your female ancestors. Who is in the photo? When was it taken? Why did you select this photo? This is one of tho...
-
Updated once a week, Gravestone Photographic Resource aims to digitally photograph grave monuments (that are currently legible). It covers...
-
Following on from last week's "Motivation Monday" post about NOT using the scattergun approach, today's "Tuesday'...
