| Information for individual 1615 |
Spouse/Children
|  |
| *John BALLANCE (M) | Parents/Siblings
| | Others called Ballance |
Go to home page |
| | | Date | Place | | BirthRecord
|
13/5/1722 |
London |
| | | BaptismRecord
|
13/5/1722 |
St Botolph-w-aldgate |
| | | DeathRecord
|
16/1/1770 |
Rose & Crown, New Turvill St. |
| | | YoungPictures
|
| | | Life&Work
|
| | | Will/Admon
|
| |
| Born in Petticoat Lane (Information mainly from David Ballance)
John was a silk weaver at the time of his marriage in 1743, but he later became a victualler.
Their eldest son, John, became a weaver at first, though there is no formal record of his apprenticeship. On 26 September 1743, he married Mary Reeves, widow of Oliver Reeves, a Bethnal Green weaver, by whom she seems to have had at least one child, a daughter Mary, who died in 1742.
Her first marriage had been in 1733, when, according to TP, she was only sixteen. Her maiden name was Rollo, which may be an anglicisation of Rouleau, but may be Scottish. I can find no trace of her baptism, nor of her father's name, but her mother Alice was still living in 1779 "in distressed circumstances", according to her daughter's Will.
The first four children of John and Mary--Mary, Charity, Thomas and John--all died in infancy and were laid to rest at St Matthew Bethnal Green. In 1746 John was still a weaver, but by 1748 he had become a victualler: that is, a publican. In 1747 he had joined his father in New Turvil Street , paying tax for six rents on a property slightly larger than his father's four. This was The Rose and Crown. As its landlord, he appears in the official licensing lists from then till his death in 1770. His widow continued the licence for two more years before leaving the larger property and continuing to live in what had been Thomas's house until about 1783. It was normal for weavers to become innkeepers, or to moonlight as such. The 1740s marked the height of the "gin epidemic" in East London, and spirit drinking remained very high until at least 1751, when Hogarth's Gin Lane met an appreciative public. His famous Apprentices, Good and Bad, were weavers! It was probably a good moment to enter the victualling trade.
But John seems not to have drunk all the profits. He died intestate in January 1770, but his wife survived until 1786, and made her Will in 1779. It mentions leasehold property: two brick houses on the north side of New Castle Street, Bethnal Green, and two more on the south side of Castle Street . There was also freehold property in Artichoke Lane, St George's-in-the-East. There are domestic details, too: a silver tankard marked "I.B." was to go to her son Thomas, and specified furniture with "the blue and white checked bed-linen" was to be his sister Mary's. The latter eventually married one Robert Hughes, of Woodford, in 1800, and died in 1831, by which time she had moved to live near her brother and nephew in Well Street, Hackney. |
|
|
| Information for individual 1627 |
Spouse/Children
|  |
| >Thomas BALLANCE (M) | | Others called Ballance |
Go to home page |
| | | Date | Place | | BirthRecord
|
1695 |
|
| | | BurialRecord
|
5/6/1748 |
Bethnal Green, New Turvill St. |
| | | YoungPictures
|
| | | Life&Work
|
| | | Will/Admon
|
| |
| Silk weaver
admons pcc
FROM DAVID BALLANCE...
The earliest record I have found that certainly refers to a direct Ballance ancestor is the baptism at St Mary Whitechapel, on 10 November 1717 of "Mary, daughter of Thomas and Charity Ballance, of 3 Tun Alley ".
In 1739, this girl married James Legrew, a weaver; she died in 1792. Their descendants have been the subject of my most recent enquiries; A traditional pedigree, transcribed by Nowell Myres and henceforth called "TP", gives birth-dates of 1695 to both Thomas and Charity, and a marriage date of 1716. The birth-year seems likely enough, though it presumably does not derive from a baptismal entry in a register, where the parentage would be given. Charity's maiden name was Dupierre, which is one variant of a quite common Huguenot surname, rendered elsewhere as Deper, Duper and so on.
Much more promising are the Ballances of Broxbourne, on the R. Lea in Hertfordshire, and of neighbouring parishes. Here occurs the only baptism yet found for a Thomas in anything like a suitable year: he was the son of Robert Ballance of Hoddesdon, baptised at Broxbourne, 22 April 1694. He had at least six siblings baptised there between 1689 and 1699; his mother died in 1712 and his father in 1720, after which the family vanishes from there. Unfortunately, the parish registers are missing before August 1688, having been used by a later Clerk to make patterns, but there is at Chelmsford Record Office a Will made in 1678 by one Robert Ballands, a tailor of Hoddesdon, who died in that year. Since his son Robert was then of full age, this may well be the grandfather of the 1694 Robert, not the father. As the family disappears from Hertfordshire, so a group of Ballances bearing a closely similar series of Christian names appears in East London, only a few miles away down river. It is hard to believe that this is coincidental. Other entries appear in the neighbouring parishes of Great Amwell (1684-1705) and Cheshunt (1647-1719); in the last year, William Balance of the latter parish left a shilling to his "kinsman" Thomas. It seems best to present this circumstantial evidence of the Broxbourne/London connection in detail. Note that five of the seven names in the 1688-99 series of baptisms appear in apprenticeships and marriages in East London at appropriate ages.
It remains possible that this "Thomas I" was a Frenchman. His great-grandson, John II, who took an interest in the family history as a young man, drew a Tree in 1800, which is now owned by his descendant Harold Thomson, at Cupar in Fife. Although this gives no parentage for Thomas I, John was socially ambitious and later guessed that he might have descended from a De Balance family in the Saintonge area, who were once Lords of Cahusac (now Cahuzac) in Guienne, 1108-1303. There seems to be not the slightest evidence for this, nor for the possession of any arms or crest, though John had the latter discovered by a fraudulent heraldic agent. If the family really had been French, it seems strange that John's father, Thomas II, who lived from 1749 to 1842, and must have known his grandmother Charity very well, had no tradition to pass on of these origins, which can hardly have failed to interest him, since his father-in-law, as we shall see, was French-speaking. A stronger argument is that there are no Ballance records in the extensive registers of the French churches in London or the provinces, except, as previously noted, for a brief earlier period at Canterbury.
There remains one piece of evidence that is hard to explain away. On 10 August 1724, one Thomas Ballame was admitted by the Court of the Weavers' Company as a "foreign master", on proof of his service within the Guild; "m" for "nc" is a simple transliteration mistake, which I have myself known people make. He certainly appears in the Weavers' Quarterage Accounts from 1726 to 1740 with the note "ad." against him, like other weavers with foreign names, there being no subsequent mentiom of a "Ballame". He was admitted to Freedom in 1739, by which time certain earlier problems connected with a surge of French refugees must have vanished. He might, however, have been working with Frenchmen in Spitalfields and been considered by the Company on the same terms as real foreigners, as having no family connection or formal apprenticeship. One old family tradition has an ancestor escaping from France in an apple-barrel. I have heard this independently from Ballances in southern Africa, but even if it was true, it might apply to a Descarrieres or a Heudebourck, whose Huguenot origins are beyond doubt.
By contrast, Dupierres and their variants are almost too common, but in several families. The name occurs at Canterbury and London right back into the sixteenth century, but in common with other weaving families the Canterbury ones drifted Londonwards between 1670 and 1700. Charity's baptism has not been found, but the surname appears in so many forms that an entry could easily be missed. It is likely that she came from the Canterbury family, from whom two sisters, Judich and Marie, married two brothers Legrou, David and Fran ois, in 1685 and 1687; Marie and Fran ois were the grandparents of James Legrew, who, as we have seen, married Charity's daughter Mary. She may have been an unrecorded daughter of Solomon Deper (or Dupar, or Depree...). He married a Mary; they had a daughter Elizabeth, baptised at St Dunstan Stepney in 1694. He paid a sewer rate in Spitalfields New Town, 1713, and was buried at Whitechapel, 3 September 1721, when the administration of his Will was recorded by the Commissary Court as having been granted to his widow. They were at this time living in Three Tun Alley, which had been Charity's home in 1717 and may still have been. Many other members of the family can be found under various spellings in East London during the century, especially a succession of three Nathanaels, from a family originally in Lyon, and a number of Abrahams. Most seem to have been weavers, but nothing has yet appeared to connect them directly with Charity.
Three Tun Alley cannot have been a very pleasant place. It is named on Roque's Map of 1747 as a very narrow lane parallel to Wentworth Street , connecting Petty Coat Lane with Old Castle Street . It had been in existence in 1681, when it was marked, but not named, on Ogilvy and Morgan's Map, which is shown on p. 27. It must have been tight and congested, though Roque shows gardens making a break in the line of houses at one point. As in most of this area, details have vanished on the ground, though Wentworth Street is still there, and the general line of Petticoat Lane (i.e. Middlesex Street) remains the same. I visited the site in 1985, when redevelopment was taking place, at a point about a third of the way from the west end of the original Alley. The family moved around in their early years: the second child, Thomas, was baptised at St Dunstan Stepney on 22 September 1719, when the father was described as a weaver "of Spittalfields". Strictly, Spitalfields was a hamlet within the parish of St Dunstan, though the term was used vaguely to describe the whole area from the north side of Whitechapel High Road to Shoreditch Church; to the SE it abutted on Mile End, and to the NE on Bethnal Green. Christ Church Spitalfields became a separate parish on the completion of Hawksmoor's great church in 1729 , and Bethnal Green was also separated from Stepney in 1745, when St Matthew's opened .
For some time I could not find the birth of the third child, John, my direct ancestor, but eventually an entry appeared at St Botolph-without-Aldgate for the baptism of "Jno, son of Thomas and Charity Ballant", 13 May 1722; they were then living in Petticoat Lane.
It is not surprising that they did the rounds of the local fonts for their earlier children's baptisms, for questions could have been asked about their marriage. The TP puts this in 1716, which is conveniently respectable, but the only record I can find is for the wedding of Thomas "Balanes" and Charity Deper at St Botolph Bishopsgate on 10 October 1721. Yet another church had been used!
Five further children were born to them. The first Thomas had evidently died, so the boy baptised on 28 April 1728 was given the same name; the other four all died in infancy. Between 1727 and 1735 the family moved northwards to Bethnal Green. When the Land Tax records began in 1745, they were living in New Turvil Street , a cul-de-sac on the east side of Cock Lane , now Boundary Street. For this, see Roque's Map on p. 8. It was on the west side of what was to be a dreadful Victorian slum, and the whole area has been several times rebuilt, the approximate site being now covered by LCC housing. Though it lay within the parish of Bethnal Green, its inhabitants could have been forgiven for worshipping in St Leonard Shoreditch , at the end of the road. Here Thomas died in 1748, and was buried at Bethnal Green on 5 June. Unfortunately for us, he left no Will, but there was enough property for his widow to be granted Letters of Administration. She survived until 1767, presumably living with her son, but she also died intestate. Attempts to perpetuate her name were remarkably ill-fated, even for the age, since not one of the five children and grandchildren named after her seems to have survived infancy.
In 1748, three children of the marriage remained. The eldest, Mary, as we have seen, made a good marriage, and we shall return to her at the very end. Thomas (here called Ib) is something of a mystery. One early Tree says that he went to Ulster, but if he did so he seems to have come back. He certainly married early, though I have not traced the record, and is probably to be identified with a Thomas Ballance who had ten children between 1748 and 1766. Most of them died in infancy and were buried at Bethnal Green, or, later, at St Botolph Bishopsgate and Shoreditch, since the family were living in Norton Folgate , a Liberty, but between those two churches. This may have been the Thomas Ballance buried at Bethnal Green in 1804; he was definitely alive in 1787, when his sister left him an annuity of 20, to be paid weekly by her executors--which might suggest several things about him! Two of his sons, Thomas and George, certainly survived to the same year, when they were both left 20. The former is probably the one whose marriage to Sarah Sharplin is reproduced on p. 17, and, if so, he was a coal-merchant in Whitechapel. His later history is uncertain, but his son Thomas was apparently still alive in 1823, when he was mentioned in the Will of his cousin Mary. George, who was christened George Augustus, was a sailor. When his Will was made, in 1793, he was a seaman aboard H.M.S. Windsor Castle. He died in 1796, both his children having died in infancy at Plymouth. |
|
|
