It was a bit of a shock, having moved to Essex quite by chance over 40 years ago, to find that
my Essex roots go back to at least the 17th century, and probably quite a bit further. Such is
the case with the Skinners: “John son of John & Dorothy Skinner was born January 25th (being
St Paul's Day) between 11 & 12 o'clock at night 1651”. This is the first record in the earliest
surviving register for Witham, and it had been written in as a memorandum on the flyleaf.
It is, of course, good practice to start with the most recent known facts and work backwards,
and so the investigation began 200 years later and some 40 odd miles south down the A12 in
Stratford.
My great great grandparents were John and Mary Skinner (née Holbrook) who had married in
Leyton on the 20th April 1827. They had six children born in West Ham and Stratford between
1827 and 1838 and they seem to have had a rather haphazard approach to their children’s
baptisms: Emma and Alfred James, born in 1827 and 1828 respectively, were baptised
together at West Ham All Saints in 1828. John, born in 1832, and Henry born in 1838, were
baptised together at St John Stratford in December 1838 after the death of their father John
in October that year. That left Ann, born in 1830, and Sarah born in about 1837, as far as I
could tell, unbaptised. Ann was 15 when she was baptised on the 22nd March 1846 at St John
in Stratford and the register gives her birthday as the 13th August 1830, and confirms her
parents as John and Mary Skinner (both deceased), residing in Stratford, with her father’s
occupation as Shoemaker. So far I haven’t traced a baptism for Sarah.
In 1841 the Skinner family is living in Chapel Street in Stratford in Essex. The household
consists of the widowed Mary Skinner, aged 35, and her five children; Alfred had died before
his first birthday. Mary Skinner died in 1842, and her mother, Mary Holbrook, who’d been
holding the family together, died in 1847. As a result the children are scattered at the time of
the 1851 census, with the three girls all in various kinds of service in the Stratford area, and
their son John, aged 16 (19 actually), working as a shoemaker; he would have been six when
his father died so he must have served an apprenticeship with someone else. Surprisingly
though, Henry the youngest, born shortly after his father’s death in 1838, is a scholar in the
Witham Union House, and knowing how picky parishes generally were on whom they’d
support, I guessed there must have been some kind of family connection. (Henry remained
confused by this, and his military records give his place of birth as Stratford, near Witham, in
Essex.)
In Stratford in 1841 and 1851, there was another Skinner family, and the father, William was
also a shoemaker. He was born in Witham in 1800, and was running a large and successful
business in Stratford by 1841. He had married his wife Harriott Elizabeth Hall in Leyton on the
6th February 1825, in the same church where John Skinner married Mary Holbrook on the
20th April two years later. The facts are gathering to suggest that William and John are
brothers, and that William had a hand in the support of John’s children after their parents’
deaths, by taking on John junior as an apprentice, and sending Henry to Witham, and later
training him up in shoemaking too. Perhaps he also sponsored Ann’s belated baptism.
So back to the Witham parish records and a helpful will. The only William Skinner born
around the right time in Witham was baptised on the 15th June 1800, having been born on
the 6th April to John Skinner and his wife Mary Davies. They had been married after banns in
Witham on the 25th December 1799, and were both single and of Witham parish. They did
not have any subsequent children baptised in Witham however, and for John to be William’s
brother he needs to have been born in about 1806.
Here’s where the Essex Wills Beneficiaries Index, 1505-1916, on FindMyPast, came in useful,
for John Skinner and Mary Davies are both named in the will of John Hagger junior, surgeon
of Little Waltham (though at his burial on 30th June 1800 he is referred to as an apothecary).
John Hagger wrote his will on the evening of 1st October 1799 with no named executors or
administrator, and Mary Davies, his servant, was the only witness to both the writing and
placing of the document. By the 8th August 1800 when all the legal problems are beginning to
be sorted out Mary is described as “the wife of John Skinner of Witham … shoemaker” in an
affidavit.
It seems likely that John Skinner grew up in Little Waltham, for a Samuel Skinner was well-
established there during the 1780s and 1790s as a master cordwainer; with his wife Elizabeth,
he had ten children baptised in the village. John is not among them, for he was born in
Chelmsford in 1779 when Samuel was a shoemaker in Moulsham. Samuel Skinner had
married Elizabeth Outten in St Mary’s in Chelmsford on the 6th July 1778.
John Skinner and Mary (née Davies) moved back to Little Waltham after their marriage and
the birth of William in Witham, and had two daughters born there: Mary Ann in 1802 and
Sarah in 1805. They then moved to Great Waltham, where they had a son John born in 1806,
and two more daughters born in 1808 and 1815. Mary died in Great Waltham in January
1854; in the 1841 census she is 75, and the widow of a shoemaker, in 1851 she is, more
correctly 76, and a pauper.
The Samuel Skinner who married Elizabeth Outten was a native of Witham. Born on the 16th
December 1753, he was the second son of Samuel Skinner and Mary Finch who had married
on the 7th May 1747 in Great Dunmow. Samuel senior is described as a Bay Rougher of
Chipping Hill in Witham in his mother-in-law Elizabeth Finch’s will of 1766. He’d been born in
Witham on the 8th August 1725 to Samuel Skinner and his wife Anne (née Cracknell) who’d
married in Ulting in 1721. I’m not sure of the exact date of thir marriage as the Ulting parish
registers for this period are lost, but I have a copy of the Marriage licence bond and allegation
dated 19th October which says they are both single and from Witham, and that he is 30 years
old and she is 28.
It’s useful that his age is given on the licence allegation as there were two Samuel Skinners
born in Witham between 1685 and 1690; if he is 30 in 1721 that sets his birth year as 1689 or
1690, which makes him the son of John Skinner and Mary who was baptised in Witham on the
10th April 1689. John and Mary Skinner presented six children for baptism in Witham
between 1677 and 1692, so this is probably the John mentioned in my opening paragraph.
The two John Skinners (the elder died in 1679. and the younger in 1731/2) both worked in the
cloth trade as baymakers, weavers, clothiers and tailors and lived in Chipping Hill. Samuel
born in 1689 and his son Samuel born in 1725 continued in this trade, but the next Samuel
born in 1753 became a cordwainer, and this became the trade of his descendants, right down
to John’s sons John and Henry living in Stratford and East London in the second half of the
nineteenth century.
As for the Charles Skinner who appears in the 1841 census living “near the turnpike” in
Stratford, born in Essex and working as a journeyman shoemaker, he is most likely the cousin
of William and John Skinner, who was born in Little Waltham in 1803, the son of their uncle
Charles Skinner. I can find him on no other censuses and he appears to have been buried
back in Little Waltham on the 21st December 1848.
Bradley families: the Skinners
The Skinner family from Witham in Essex: baymakers and cordwainers
