Hannah Kettle

Hannah Kettle was baptised at Hatfield, the next parish to Thorne across the levels, on the 25th of November 1761 — a daughter of John and Susannah Kettle, whose names the Thorne register would one day record in its own margins: when Hannah's children were baptised in the parish's expansive Dade years, the clerk set down not just the parents but the mother's parentage, "Dr. of Jno. Kettle", "D. of John & Susanh: Kettle", so that her family travels inside her children's entries.

She married William Richman, mariner of Thorne, in the register year 1783/84 — his second marriage; his first wife had died at twenty-three — and in twenty years bore nine children: Susanna, John, Martin, Robert, Nanny, Henry, Hannah, Mary, and Henry again. The names chart two family habits: the register's spelling turned from Richman to Richmond midway through her children, and the sixth child, Henry — born and baptised in one September day in 1795 — lived only two months, so the ninth child carried the name on, for the boy's sake and the grandfather's.

She died on the 21st of June 1804, and was buried at Thorne the next day. The parish register, which kept a "distemper" column that year, records her age as forty-one and her end in a correction the leaf still shows: the clerk wrote "Killed", struck it through, and wrote "Accidental Death." What happened is not recorded — the bishop's transcript, which has no cause column at all, carries only the dates and the age — and no fuller account has yet been found. Her youngest son, the second Henry, was seventeen months old; her husband never remarried. The family's own note gave her age as forty-three, and her 1761 baptism sits closer to forty-two — burial-register ages were the family's guess, given at the church door on the worst day.