As noted in the blog post for Mary Kitchen Pearson, shortly before her son Henry was born in 1842, a tin plate worker named Henry Walker was living with the family in Cromford, Derbyshire.
A man is making cooking and storage utensils from tin. Wood engraving. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark
The 1841 census tells us that he was not born in Derbyshire, and that he was twenty-five years old, so born in about 1816. (Mary was twenty at the time.)
I decided to find out more about him, to see if there are any further clues, apart from the name that she gave her son and the fact that he was in the right place at the right time!
A Google search revealed an entry in the 1861 census, where Henry Walker, tin plate worker, was living with his wife Emma and eight-year-old daughter, Mary Ann, in the Cromford alms houses.
In 1871 they were in Uttoxeter, with another three daughters, Eliza, Annie and Ellen. Henry was working as a brazier.
I found the marriage certificate on Findmypast. Henry Walker, a tin plate worker, aged thirty-one, married Emma Cox, aged twenty-one, in August 1852 at Marchington Chapel (now St Peter’s church) in Staffordshire.
Henry’s father was apparently William Walker, a locksmith, but I have not found a baptism that matches.
The 1851 census, which is extremely faint, shows that Henry (a tinman and brazier) was lodging with Emma and her father John in Monk Street, Tutbury, Staffordshire. John was a weaver, receiving parish relief.
I don’t know what happened to Henry after 1871, but in 1876 Emma married a widowed carter named James Keeling in Birmingham. (There is a possible death of a Henry Walker earlier that same year, born 1817.)
Now what we need is a DNA match with another descendant to prove that this is the right family!
Ari, this is how you are possibly related to Henry:
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