Thomas Jeffrey

Died 28th September 1849 

Thomas Jeffrey was 15 and working as a tailor when he died from cholera. He was the first born son of Barbara and Bernard Jeffrey. Bernard was living in Bondgate and was a cabinet maker, when Thomas was baptised on 30th March 1834, and when their daughter Barbara Jane was baptised on 10th December 1837.

Their mother, Barbara died on 27th February 1840 age 28.
There is no record of the family on the 1841 census. Bernard was married again in March 1842 , to Jane Thompson, in Alnwick.

We know that Thomas Jeffrey was living in Clayport, when he died during the first week of the cholera outbreak, on 28th September 1849. Information that he was working as a tailor also came from his newspaper obituary.

Three years later, the 1851 census shows Bernard living in Clayport with his second wife Jane, age 32 and born (in 1819) in Ellingham. Daughter Barbara Jane was now 14, and they had another daughter, Isabella age 6. She must have been born in about 1845 ( baptised at the beginning of 1845 under “Jeffreys”) and survived the cholera outbreak.

Barbara Jane died not long after the census, on 21st May 1851.

The family must have then decided to move to Bishopswearmouth, Durham, to run a grocers shop. By the next census the couple had another child Elloner Jane, born in Bishopswearmouth in January 1861. Isabella was then 17, so Elloner could have been her daughter and not her sister. The census is full of such ambiguities.

By 1871 another son, John had been added to the family, born in1865. By 1881 they were still running a grocery business, with John working as a 16 year old apprentice.

Bernard died at the end of 1890, having outlived the whole of his first family.