Hannah Payne was entered in the 1841 Census as being born in Warwickshire between 75 and 79 years before the count and as was the practice, this was rounded down to 75 on the form. If accurate, this suggests that she was born between 7 June 1762 and 6 June 1766. However when she died in October 1841, the St Michael’s Coventry Register of Deaths puts Hannah (nee Payne) as 74 years of age so born perhaps in 1767. The only two church baptismal records that have come to light so far that would match these uncertain facts, are that either she was born to William and Esther Payne in Nuneaton in May 1766, or to William and Susannah Payne in Bishops Itchington in August 1767. In May 1785 Hannah married Job Chinn in Holy Trinity in Coventry where Job worked as a Silk Weaver.
Bishops transcripts say Job was baptised in Lapworth in Warwickshire in October 1768, the sixth of eight children born to John Chinn and Elizabeth (nee Bates). Baptisms there would and weddings would presumably have taken place in the church of St Mary the Virgin. Lapworth is a quiet little settlement just off the Old Warwick Road out of Hockley Heath towards Warwick. This road at this point follows the track of an ancient Salt Road, running along the great watershed of England splitting catchment areas feeding to the one side, the River Severn and to the other, the River Trent. Strangely Lapworth Station and Lapworth Village Hall are both a mile further down the road in what was originally Kingswood. Rowington is a further two miles on. The National Trust properties of Packwood House and Baddesley Clinton are close by. Carl Chinn, the well-known Birmingham Historian and one-time Professor of History at Birmingham University has traced his Chinn family back to Rowington, so we may be related, albeit distantly.
Hannah and Job had seven known children and while sons Job and John both followed their father into becoming Silk Weavers, and William trained as a watch-maker their three daughters married into the silk trade – Elizabeth married Charles Copson and was living with Job and Hannah in Gosford Street in the 1841 census, while the youngest, Ann Chinn married Thomas Hulk in St Michael’s in 1825.
Hulk, or Hulks, is an unusual surname that exists in English records for the 1500s and 1600s mainly around Hertfordshire and Essex, perhaps across to Kent. As the surname otherwise only appears to exist at this time in Finland, Germany and the Netherlands perhaps the family emigrated to England in the normal course of events bringing a particular trade into the country, or perhaps they were Huguenots or some other religious persuasion out of fashion at the time, fleeing persecution on the continent. By the early 1700s there were Hulk families in Coventry and when the Census returns find them 140 years later, they were Silk Weavers.
The earliest entry in the records is Henry Hulks, born in Coventry probably between 1700 and 1710. His first wife Hannah died in 1731 and it seems he married Elizabeth Holmes in the City in 1734. Perhaps Elizabeth was the “Widow Hulk” who died in 1768. Other Hulks in Coventry also married around then – Elizabeth Hulks married Thomas Cornhill in 1717, and Mary Hulks married Francis Perkins in 1725. In 1763 a William Hulks married Rebekah Clevely of Stoneleigh by Licence and the baptisms of their children William (1764), Sarah (1766) and Rebekah (1769) are in the records of Coventry churches. Of these children, Sarah married James Figgs in 1787, perhaps it was this William who married Sarah Bolstridge in St Michaels Coventry in March 1796.
The Bolstridge name is historical and is already the subject of a Guild-Registered One-Name Study following a line of Bedworth Silk Weavers back many hundreds of years to titled families. Sarah’s father was one of the two Thomas Bolstridges baptised in Bedworth in 1745 and we have a DNA link back through Sarah’s Mother Hannah (nee King), born in Allesley, Coventry in 1735.
William Hulk and Sarah had six known children, and the three sons born between 1799 and 1811 that are known to have survived all became Coventry Silk-Weavers. The second son, Thomas born in 1804 married Ann Chinn in St Michaels in 1815.
Thomas Hulk and Ann had three known daughters. Two arrived soon after the marriage, Ann in 1826 and Jane in 1829. In the 1841 Census they were living in Spon End. Perhaps there had been other births who died young, but in December 1841 a third and last daughter Selina was born when they lived in Gosford Street. But both Selina and her mother Ann (nee Chinn) were dead with a year. The surviving two daughters both married Whitesmiths – Workers in tin and pewter rather than iron.
Ann married Joseph Willis in 1850 with whom she had 5 daughters of her own, while in 1852 Jane Hulk married Joseph Horsfall, an orphan from another long-standing Coventry silk-weaving family who is also recorded as living in Gosford Street. On marriage initially they stayed in Gosford Street where their first son Thomas was born in 1853, then East Street where joseph arrived in 1855. Finally they moved to Little South Street where Emily-Jane Horsfall was born in late 1860. In the late 1890s Little South Street was demolished to make way for the new Coventry City Football Ground, Highfield Road, but even this has now been demolished (2006) and the area is covered by housing.
They are there in the 1861 census when Joseph is still a Whitesmith and Jane shows as a Ribbon Weaver with her three children to look after, but within two years they moved to Birmingham where there is recorded a baptism of Emily Jane I St Andrew’s Bordesley. In 1871 Joseph is a Bolt-Forger (as are Thomas and Joseph) living on the bottom of the Dudley Road in Ladywood. By 1880 the family was probably living at 12 Northbrook Street while Joseph was working as a Brass Bell-Forger at the Henry Wiggin factory round the corner by the canal in Wiggin Street. Their son Thomas was living with them as a Blacksmith while the other son Joseph was a Nut and Bolt Forger now married and living with his wife Alice around the corner in Stour Street. Emily, at 21, was still a scholar but was married under two years later. .
Jane (nee Hulk) died in early 1881.
But Came They All to Birmingham 