This post is prompted by the #52ancestors prompt “Negatives”. One of the negatives of researching family history or, indeed, any history, is high infant and childhood mortality. I thought I would write about one family who suffered more than their fair share of such loss.
Robert Charley was born around 1734 in Combe Martin, Devon, a picturesque town on the north Devon coast. He was baptised in the parish church on 11 September 1734. Robert was a younger child on Richard Charley and his wife Joan Willis. Unfortunately, the baptism registers have a gap from 1725 to 1731, so I don’t know about any children born in that period. Robert’s known siblings were Elizabeth, Richard, William, Mary and another Mary. The first Mary died in infancy and it was common practice to reuse the names of dead children. Brother Richard also appears to have died young in 1737, aged about 20; I don’t know about Elizabeth and the second Mary.
