Elizabeth Clark

For most of the family's history Elizabeth Clark was only a name — the wife written beside Thomas Brock in the record of their son George's parentage, with nothing behind her. The Haxey registers give her back a beginning.

She was baptised at Haxey, on the Isle of Axholme, on 27 April 1759, a daughter of Thomas Clark and his wife Mary. She was not the first Elizabeth in that house: a daughter of the same name had been baptised in June 1757 and buried two days afterwards. Her parents gave the name again to the child who lived — as grieving families often did — and it was this second Elizabeth who grew up to marry.

On 31 July 1776, at the parish church of St Nicholas, she married Thomas Brock, both of them — the register notes — “of this Parish”. She was about seventeen. It is a small entry with a long reach: written plainly in the Haxey marriage register, it is the record that finally settled which woman was George Brock's mother, confirming the Elizabeth Clark that Janet Brock had recorded and setting aside a stray “Sarah” that a later copyist had introduced on one of the baptisms.

Thomas was a Haxey farmer, and the Brocks a family who moved with their work between the Trent-side parishes, so that Elizabeth's children were baptised across two counties — Haxey and Headon and Beckingham. Through the 1770s and 1780s she raised a large family: Thomas, Elizabeth, Ann, James, Martha, and, in 1788 at Beckingham, George — the son through whom this line descends — and later Robert. Beyond her marriage and her children the record is quiet, but its end is now known: she died in the winter of 1821 and was buried at Haxey on 6 December, aged sixty-three — four and a half years before Thomas. She is a name no longer.