Thomas Brock was baptised at Haxey, in the Isle of Axholme, on 16 October 1745 — a son of Robert Brock and his wife Elizabeth. He was a Haxey man the whole of his life.
On 31 July 1776 he married Elizabeth Clark, a Haxey girl of about seventeen; the register sets them down as “both of this Parish,” and both signed their own names. In the years that followed they raised their family in the parish and, for a time, across the Trent in Nottinghamshire — the children’s baptisms run from Haxey to Headon and Beckingham and back again, the moving of a family that followed its work. Among them was a son, George, baptised at Beckingham in 1788, through whom this line descends.
Thomas was a farmer. In 1787, at Beckingham, he claimed the government’s bounty for growing flax, and the bond that survives names him plainly — “Thomas Brock, Beckingham, farmer.” By the turn of the century he had returned to Haxey and was styled “Mr. Thomas Brock, of Haxey” — a mark of some standing in a parish of labourers and smallholders. When a freehold estate was put up for auction in the autumn of 1802, the particulars in the Stamford Mercury named him as the man in possession of the land it offered at Haxey: a newly-enclosed close out on Carnley Common, and two closes of rich land at Westwoodside — some eight acres of good Axholme ground that he farmed.
Elizabeth died in the winter of 1821 and was buried at Haxey on 6 December, aged sixty-three, leaving Thomas a widower after forty-five years of marriage. He outlived her by four and a half years, and was buried at Haxey on 27 May 1826, in his eighty-first year. It was land that held Thomas Brock to Haxey; it was through his son George that the family’s older trade, milling, carried on — eastward across the county, and in time to Tetney.
Composed from validated records · 2026-07-01