My 2nd great grandfather Thomas Blyth married Elizabeth Bates Baxter in Scarning Church, near East Dereham in Norfolk, on 24th June 1828, just a couple of months after the death of his father William Blyth (he was buried on 6th April that year). Their first son, William, was born just a few months later and baptised on 19 October: the baptism register gives Thomas’s profession as labourer.
By the time the second son, John, was born in 1831, the family had moved to Gressenhall where Thomas was listed as a husbandman, suggesting that he was now promoted to caring for the animals on the farm rather than general labouring duties. Thomas was clearly a man with ambitions: fifteen years and five children later, their son George’s baptism is recorded in Yaxham and Thomas is now a farmer in his own right. Probably a tenant farmer, but several steps up from a common labourer – some of whom he would now have employed.
Their remaining children – they had twelve in all, only losing one, Elizabeth Susanna, young – were born in Yaxham, Thomas was a ‘farmer of 6 or 9 acres’. Depending whether you believe the 1851 or 1861 census….The 1871 census however, unequivocally states that he was the ‘owner’ of 6 acres, so it is fair to assume he began as tenant of 9 acres and purchased 6 acres of this land later. Although registered as Yaxham (which is where the children were baptised), Thomas and his family actually lived on Badley Moor, a few miles out of Yaxham. He was still farming there after being widowed in 1881, helped on the farm by sons George and John who is described in the terminology of the day as an ‘imbecile’, while his unmarried daughter Sarah kept house for them. Thomas died in 1886: both he and Elizabeth are buried in Yaxham churchyard.
Sadly, George and John died, in 1881 and 1882 respectively, while the 1891 census records a Sarah Blyth born in Gressenhall as a cook in St Leonards, Sussex, suggesting she had had to find work to support herself after her father’s death. Indeed, it seems the middle sons Robert and Edward benefited most from Thomas’s hard work: Robert was a labourer in Yaxham (presumably on his father’s farm) in 1871; by 1881 he was a gardener in Northwold but in the 1891 census he appears as a farmer in his own right on Norwich Road in Yaxham. While in 1881 Edward was an agricultural labourer in Wacton yet by 1891 he had managed to purchase his own farm in Tibenham.
So what of the others? By 1886 John, Elizabeth Susanna and George were dead; Charlotte had married and died in 1871; Elizabeth was married and as we have seen, Sarah was fending for herself. That left four brothers: William, Thomas, Joseph and Henry. Thomas had moved to Cambridgeshire as a blacksmith – more about him when we come to our Antipodean cousins – and the other three emigrated to the USA….
Sullivan Blyth Family 